Where there's no such thing as a dessert failure

Tonight, I decided to scratch my cooking itch. I haven't cooked dinner for myself in months. So I persuaded friend Tyler to join me in said venture.

Dinner, I have to say, was amazing. A pasta sauce with carrots and peppers and onions and tomatoes, garlic and rosemary, pureed with my birthday-present-immersion-blender (!) (parents, I love you so much). With al dente pasta. This was surely about a hundred steps up from the usual ketchup-and-half-a-tomato sauce-served-over-pasta-mush which passes for spaghetti here. Don't get me started on local spaghetti...Moving on.

The issue came when, after torturing ourselves with thoughts of delicious food and cold weather in the United States, Tyler and I decided that it was perfectly feasible to make a cookie cake boiled-style.

We are not, and have never claimed to be, scientists.

Charged up and ready for the adventure, we made our third trip of the night to the neighborhood bodega (named, appropriately, La Bodega), and picked up all we needed to accomplish Best Recipe's cookies, in a pan, cookie-cake style.

Undeterred by the slight tastelessness of the cookie dough (ingredients just don't have the same...kick, around here), we piled it into aluminum pans and set them to boiling.

Half an hour later, then an hour, and then an hour and a half later, we realized concurrently that we had made a terrible mistake.

The butter and wheat and separated and covered the top with a glutinous mass which, as Tyler so aptly put it, tasted like cream of wheat. To make it even more appetizing, it looked exactly like boogers.

We spent a better part of the cooking time skimming the accumulating cookie boogers off the top of the pans. Sliding down the slippery slope of defeat, we decided to fry some of them. Chocolate cookie arepa! Not able to stomach this ourselves, we passed it out to the gathered family, warning them of not-so-delicious-ness. Instead, we got positive reviews!

Which made us realize that, here, there's no such thing as a dessert failure.

Enthusiastic about having an outlet so as not to have completely wasted our efforts, we ladled out the cookie "pudding" to the family. As it cooled, it condensed into something like flour-y carmel..and it was proclaimed delicious.

"Of course you can't boil something with butter in it," said my host aunt, after polishing off her pudding. "That will never make a cake."

...Science wins again.

That being said, there's a pretty awesome ball of not-cookie sitting in our fridge. It's super fun to play with. And it's getting pretty solid. Cookieball? Cookie flubber? Cookie rock? The final outcome remains to be seen...

but I can pretty much say with 100% certainty that it will be eaten by someone in this house...and most likely enjoyed!