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I Dip, You Dip, We Dip*

I know what you’re thinking right now.

“Say what?”  you’re asking yourself.  “Erin’s writing this post?  I didn’t even think she had a kitchen.”

And I know, right?  Everything about this seems to fly in the face of conventional logic.  It’s like we’ve suddenly been thrust into some crazy alternate universe where plants eat people and cats chase dogs and I know anything about food preparation beyond how to read the instructions for microwaving.

Yet here I am, about to give you folks a recipe.

Ok, it probably doesn’t hurt that this is just about the easiest, most foolproof recipe on the face of the planet and requires absolutely no use of the oven, which is good, because that’s where we keep our board games.

Katie introduced me to these dessert balls when she brought them in for a work potluck and a fistfight almost broke out over them (okay, so I started it–but I can’t help that I get territorial about food).  And since I’m going to an honest-to-goodness slumber party tonight, I decided that it would be the perfect occasion to share the disgustingly decadent wealth.

The original recipe can be found on Tasty Kitchen.  But my version comes with witty commentary.  So there.

Anyhoo, hang onto your panties, people, cause away we go…

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Truffles

You’ll need to somehow procure the following ingredients.  Go to the grocery store, steal ‘em from your neighbor’s house, whatevs.  I’m not here to judge:

  • 2-½ cups All-purpose Flour
  • 1-½ teaspoon Baking Soda
  • 1 teaspoon Salt
  • 1 cup Butter (at room temperature)
  • ¾ cups White Sugar
  • ¾ cups Packed Brown Sugar
  • 1 teaspoon Vanilla
  • ⅓ cups Milk (or Soy Milk, if you’re feeling funky)
  • 1 cup Mini Semi-sweet Chocolate Chips
  • 14 ounces (weight) Dark Chocolate Candy Coating
  • Waxed Paper and a Baking Sheet or two (this recipe makes about 70 truffles)
  • A few Toothpicks, or some other stabby device

Got everything?  Ok, let’s do this.

1. Dump your butter, sugar and brown sugar into a large bowl and mix with an electric mixer on low to medium speed until everything’s well blended.

It should look like this:

By the way, this is an egg-less recipe so feel free to eat all the dough you want while you’re making it.  Not that the threat of salmonella has ever stopped anyone before, amiright?

2. Add in the milk and vanilla.

3. Then stir in the baking soda, flour and salt.

Expert Tip:  If your bag of flour still doesn’t open after the third attempt, feel free to go all Hulk Mania on it and accidentally punch a hole in the side of the bag.  It won’t help anything, but it’ll relieve some stress.

4. Put your bowl in the kitchen sink to contain the mess and mix all that nonsense on low speed until it looks like this:

I get to lick the beater now, right?

5.  Dump in the chocolate chips and spoon-stir until they’re well mixed.

6.  Here’s where you’re going to get a little ‘handsy’ (in a good baking way, not a creepy-stranger-on-the-bus kind of way).  Form one-inch balls of dough and place them on a baking sheet lined with waxed paper.   It may help to lightly coat your hands in flour before trying this.

7.  Now stick those suckers in the freezer for 30 minutes and take some time to contemplate the crazy world we live in where I’m doling out useful recipe advice.  Hah!  Insanity, right??

8.  Also during this downtime, gets to melting your Dark Chocolate Candy Coating according to the instructions on the package.  I used Log House Chocolate CandiQuick Coating, which just so happened to come in its own microwaveable tray.  Um, fewer dishes to wash?  Holla’!

9.  Once the chocolate is nice and gooey and thoroughly melted, resist the urge to plow face-first into it, pull your balls out (huh huh) of the freezer and get to dipping!  I used a toothpick because, well, I’m just fancy like that.  But you can use a fondue stick, fork or whatever sharp, stabby utensil works best for you.

**A Word of Caution:  If you’re anything like me, this part will get extremely messy so I recommend treating your kitchen like a murder scene.  Put a heavy-duty tarp down on the floor, cover everything on your counter in saran wrap and put on a shower cap.  Go naked if you must.  (Just don’t tell anyone you did until after they’ve already tried them.)**

10.  Dip each cookie dough ball  individually, tap the excess chocolate off, and return it to the lined baking sheet.

My balls started getting soft (huh huh) and unmanageable halfway through, so I just popped them back into the freezer for another 15 minutes and reheated the chocolate a bit.

11. Once they’re all done, put the tray in the fridge and chill them until the chocolate coating’s nice and firm.  Transfer them to an airtight container and store them in the fridge for up to one week.

And I shall call you “Breakfast”.

Voila!

Now go forth and make as many ball-dipping jokes as you can.

* By the way, I had a way nastier title for this post but it made even me blush so I decided to keep it to a clean Old Skool rap reference.

To all the impressionable children reading this blog:  You’re welcome.

And: Where the heck are your parents?

When You Wish Upon a Tree

Yesterday I lost everything.  Well not everything, everything.  I still have my health, my family and friends, and all of my material possessions.  Except one.  My external hard drive.  Actually, I still have the hard drive – or rather, the piece of plastic shell with an attached USB cord that you would look at and say, “Yep, that’s a hard drive.”  Except it’s  not.  Because yesterday it decided to eat my life.

It had things on there – important things, at least to me, that I will never be able to replace.  Photos from my trip to Costa Rica and paragraphs I added to my 9-page novel in bouts of drunken inspiration.  Those kinds of things.

Before you say anything, I realize the perils of using a backup system as my primary means of storage.  Now, more than ever.  So that’s fine.  Blame me.  But do we ever get to question – just every once in a while – why a $100 piece of electronic equipment can’t even last AN ENTIRE F*CKING YEAR WITHOUT GOING TO SHIT?!??!??!?$!*#&(!*!*&@^!(@&*~)

I’m just wondering.

But I’m actually not as upset as I feel like I should be.  I’m freakishly numb about the whole thing.  Maybe it’s because I’m still holding out hope that the  information can be saved.  Maybe Justin’s stick-it-in-the-freezer trick will work on the 8th try or my mom’s super computer-savvy boyfriend can figure it out.  If not, I can just defrost it and boil it up for dinner tonight – the makings of my soul served up on my favorite white platter from Bed, Bath and Beyond.  It’s low-cal, too.

In reality, there are many worse things that could happen.  And punching my fist through a wall – which is what I’d like to do but its such a guy thing to do and I kind of like my knuckles anyway – just isn’t going to fix it.  I was reminded of this when I wandered into a sculpture garden off to the side of the pedestrian mall in front of the capitol building in D.C. last Tuesday.

It mostly had strange statues…

Hirshhorn Museum Statue

And one I wouldn’t mind being for a day…

(I only still have these pictures, by the way, because I’m about as neglectful at deleting things off my memory card as I am about backing up my hard drive.  Maybe if I’d spent as much money on memory cards as I did on the hard drive, I’d still have my Costa Rica pictures.)

But the garden also had a tree.  A wish tree.  (I’m willing to overlook the fact that this tree is an art installation by Yoko Ono, the woman who could arguably be blamed for the breakup of the Beatles.  Because the tree is cool.)

Theoretically, spectators are supposed to whisper their wishes to the tree.  The sign didn’t say whether the wishes were supposed to come true – it just said to whisper them.  Apparently some people didn’t feel that was enough, so they scribbled their wishes on pieces of scrap paper and stuck them on the branches of the tree.

Some wishes were straightforward, general pleas for survival.

National Wish Tree

Some were a little more specific, a little less necessary for survival.

Some were simply a sign of the times.

And others were hauntingly cryptic.

But the point is, not one of the scraps, as far as I could tell, asked for a magically repaired hard drive.  I suppose it is a little shallow.  And definitely not worth the paper.

But if I were there right now, I still might whisper a little wish to the tree.  Nothing as ridiculous as asking it to magically repair my hard drive, of course:

Dear wish tree,

Please help me rewind time and have the sense to back up all of my data like everyone always said I should before my hard drive inevitably crashes, effectively destroying months of hard work and memories.  Thank you.

National Wish Tree, Yoko Ono

Sounds reasonable, no?