Don't Try This At Home

About a year and a half ago, I posted a recipe for vegan snickerdoodles, and included a handy tip: don't use wax paper in the oven unless you plan on igniting your oven in the dead of winter. Well, this evening I learned a couple more handy tips, ironically, also learned while baking cookies.

1. Always bake cookies on a proper baking sheet. If your baking sheet has holes in it, it is highly likely that the dough will drop into those holes when the refrigerator dough heats up, creating little lava pools on the bottom of your oven. Your kitchen will then fill up with smoke, as it pours out through the top of your stove and the sides of your oven, and you will have the joy of scrubbing that black-baked dough out of your oven later, when it is about as hard as lava rocks.

2. Do not bake cookie dough in the microwave. At least not for ten minutes at full power. Perhaps there is a recipe somewhere for cookies that can be baked in the microwave, but alas, I did not read one before doing so. Since my cookies were still slightly soft, after I hastily pulled them out when the smoke started to fill the room, I thought I should pop them in the microwave so they could cook a little longer. After all, you can cook vegetables and noodles in the microwave, so you should be able to cook cookies, right? Wrong. I looked up 7 and a half minutes into the 10 minutes I'd programmed before sitting down to watch an episode of Modern Family (I love Sofia Vergara!), to see a steady stream of white smoke headed in my direction. Being as my microwave is about 20 feet from my bed where I was sitting, it didn't take long to reach me. I dashed over, turned off the microwave, unplugged it, and threw open my apartment door. About thirty minutes later, I deemed it safe to return inside.

Here is a picture of my sorry looking plate of cookies and very yellow microwave. I'm adding "baking sheet" to my shopping list!!!