But despite my general amazement about how she accomplishes so much EVERY day, I am usually amazed at how good her cookies are. I think about this at least once a week. My favorite are the Oreo Balls.
The recipe is fairly simple. In my own words...
Take one package of Oreo cookies and smash them up until they are more or less pulverized.
Mix in a block/box of cream cheese. (Mix in the cheese and throw away the wrapping and the box, though. It'll taste better.) Mix in the cream cheese until you can't see the cheese any more and it is just a big chocolate-y blob.
Roll teaspoon size scoops of the mix into balls and place on parchment/ wax paper. Let them sit and rest for awhile (maybe an hour or two).
Dip in melted chocolate. Wait until the chocolate covering is hard. Then refrigerate until ready to eat.
I mean, really. How hard could it be?
I've had this recipe sitting around for a few years now and finally decided this was the week to try it out.
Renee's Oreo Balls look like perfectly shaped bon bons or truffles. My balls were lumpy and misshapen.
It's usually recommended to melt chocolate in a double pan. If you're not a baker, then let me tell you this is a pan with water and another pan/or bowl sitting above the first pan with the chocolate. The theory is that as you heat up the water, the steam will gently heat up the chocolate so it is melted to smooth chocolate deliciousness.
Well, I didn't remember about the double pan concept until AFTER I had thrown my chocolate chips into the pan and watched them melt and then over heat and start turning into a chunky, nasty looking mess. I was a little horrified at what I had done and did not have another bag of chocolate chips on hand or time to run to the store to get more. And more importantly, I didn't want to waste that much chocolate. So I shrugged my shoulders, said oops and oh well, and proceeded to dip my lumpy Oreo balls into the chunky melted chocolate.
When I was finished, I did not see a tray of Oreo balls that can even come close to resembling the perfection that Renee shares with us at work. I was laughing and thinking to myself, "This looks like crap."
About that time I found myself on the phone with my sister. In the background my six year old nephew was yelling, "Tell her what I did! Tell her what I did!" When I finally made it past my sister's I'm-trying-to-be-a-good-mother-and-not-encourage-this-sort-of-behavior-in-my-children shield, she said Billy had stuck his hand on his butt (over his underwear), farted, and made his hand smell! Cool!
(I'll pause here to say that I'm the one growing up who delighted in various forms of 'potty talk.' I cracked myself up and irritated my sister to death over walking into whatever room she was in, farting and then walking out again to leave the aroma for her to complain about. My mother was constantly lecturing me about my manners and telling me not to talk about such things (or doing them) at the dinner table. And if I did, I was supposed to say, "Excuse me for passing gas" because she didn't like the word fart. Even worse, the proper term to be used in our house for poop/shit/crap was 'bowel movement' or 'BM'. And here is where I confess I'm a word rebel because to this day I say fart and 'those other words' in front of my mother just to get a rise out of her and have a laugh.)
Billy is only six, but he's observant and smart enough to have already figured out that I will laugh at this kind of stuff if he says it to me. So the timing couldn't have been better for him to share this smelly hand moment with me. Because I was already laughing at what was on the cookie tray in front of me.
So I told my sister, now tell him what I did! I just made something that looks like Chocolate Poop and I'm bringing it for dessert when we celebrate Thanksgiving this weekend.
Now I'm happy that I screwed up and forgot about the double pan thing. Chocolate Poop is really good, little boys especially really like it and it feels so wonderfully fun and devious to sit in my mother's living room eating Chocolate Poop.
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