Sugar High Friday # 41: Sweet Gifts - Best Friends & Cookies

Back when I was 12, I met a girl. We met in dance class. She was a blond, skinny, aristocratic looking girl, all arms and legs, like we all were at the time. She was one of the few dancers that could compete with me in tap-dancing. She became my friend.

J and I have spent innumerable hours together. In the beginning, it was mostly during dance classes, but soon, we met up every morning, biking to school, having a chat on the latest boy/girl gossip. After school, we'd meet up again, going to dance classes, or hanging around at the sport complex, checking out the guys on the skateboard ramp. We shared stories of first kisses, and first break-ups. We laughed, we danced and we sang. We watched Clueless, and Dirty Dancing, and Pretty Woman a hundred thousand times. When the first guy I had a crush on failed to call me (and I'd been waiting by the phone all night long), J was the girl to hold me close and feed me leftover rice pudding. When I broke up with my first long-time boyfriend, she was the one who understood the choked-by-tears words that ran through the telephone lines. She was the one to take me out dancing, all through the night, and a little bit of the morning, too.

When we started in high school, we could be together all through the day. We formed a coalition with a girl from J's class and the three of us partied our way through the first six months, caring about nothing but boys, music, clothes and hair. Oh some of the pictures from those days! In the end, we all ended up with a boyfriend. And then something happened. We drifted apart.

But at the graduation party, the last party where we'd be sure to see each other, J grabbed my hand and dragged me off to one of the toilets, pointed her finger at me and said: "I will not have this. If we are supposed to be best friends, why do we never call each other? Why aren't we there for each other when we are sad, or happy? Why do we never do stuff together?" I had no answer. But somehow I knew that if I didn't make an effort, she was sure to slip out of my life.

Even though I know it was incredibly sad at the time, I still do sort of see it as a stroke of luck that shortly after that graduation party, J's boyfriend at the time "accidently" did a Monica Lewinsky on J, forcing her to break up with him. She called me first. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The both of us moving around the globe, time spent together and apart, countless bottles of champagne and nights on the dicoteque's dance floors, large wooden boards with cheese (we are cheese lovers), a lot of men (!) and a lot of fantastic nights and days. The joy never stops. She IS my favorite girl in the whole wide world. She's the kind of woman that even though we haven't sat in front of each other for months, she can have one look at me and know what's going on. She hears it in the tone of my voice and in the way my body twists in the chair, or in how I curl my hair. She's shared my life, my story. She's a part of me.

And now, she's a mom, too. Just a little over a month ago, she gave birth to a beautiful little girl. So now I have not just one amazing woman with her gene-pool in my life, but two. I wonder if little F will grow up to like oatmeal-chocolate cookies just as much as her Mom? 'Cause her Mom sure likes these...

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies
The recipe here is, apart from me exchanging the ratios of sugar and translating the measurements to metric, a direct transcript of one from Moira's blog Who Want's Seconds? Shout-out to Moira for this recipe which, ever since I tried it the first time, have been somewhat of a staple around our home!

This of course isn't the recipe I used to make back in the days when J first got hooked on these cookies, but they're her favorite now. So what better gift to bring when Martin and I visited her, her husband and the little newborn girl a week ago - a couple logs of unbaked cookie-dough for the freezer, for those moments when you need them, be they moments of craving our unannounced guests. Giving cookie dough as a gift - any recipe that will freeze is good - is an idea I've only recently picked up, but I like it. It's all "it's homemade and I spend time (the most valuable gift of all these days) making it, so you better like it ;)". With a little cute ribbon and a card on how to bake 'em, you have a perfect sweet gift. And what do you know, that's exactly the theme for this months Sugar High Friday. The theme is Sweet Gifts, it's hosted by Habeas Brûlee, and if you hurry, you may just be able to join!

You need:

230 g. softened butter (I use unsalted)
240 g. sugar
205 g. soft brown sugar
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon baking powder
230 g. wheat flour
2 large eggs
270 g. rolled oats
300 g. milk chocolate chips

And then you:

Beat the butter with the sugars, until fluffy and white. Add the eggs one by one, beating well after each addition.
In a medium bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder and salt. Add this to the butter/sugar/egg-mixture, gently folding it in. At this stage, I always think it will never, ever get incorporated, but trust me it will. The same thing happens at the next step: add the oats, fold 'em in. They WILL incorporate, oh yes. Lastly, fold in chocolate chips.

If you want, you can bake straight away (10-20 minutes, depending on your crunchy/chewy ratio preferences) in an oven preheated to 180 degrees Celsius. Use parchment paper under the cookies.

Or, do as I do and bake a few (c'mon, you just made cookie dough, you need to taste test!), then divide the rest of the dough onto squares of clingfilm, roll them up tigthly and place in freezer. This way, you always have cookies ready for unannounced guests or hostess gifts. You don't need to defrost the dough completely before baking, but can slice and bake the cookies almost straight from the freezer. A 10 minute rest on the counter before slicing the frozen log with a serrated knife should do the trick. Bake as instructed for the unfrozen dough. I might add that I actually think the texture of the finished cookie is better after the dough has been frozen.