I like making cookies. Not fancy ones with exotic ingredients, nor ones with special shapes or fillings, just regular drop-style cookies. Specifically chocolate chip cookies.  I have a white dough recipe and a chocolate dough recipe that are the vehicles to whatever I decide to add.

In Halloweens past, when my kids were still little, we would dump their ‘trick or treating’ hoard onto the floor to count and tally their loot, making a bar chart of how much they got of each item.  We would talk of the ratio of chocolate bars or potato chips to the other stuff, and admire particularly rare or large items.  The product of their night’s activity always far outweighed what they were capable of or permitted to consume, so I would cull the bounty, selecting items that could be utilized elsewhere. Elsewhere being mostly in cookies and other baked goodness.

Smarties, M&M’s, and Reese’s pieces are pretty average cookie fare.  Plain chocolate and almond chocolate bars are nice to chop up and add to the mix.  Never the ‘cookie’n cream’ ones though (If they are nasty to eat straight up, putting them in a cookie does not improve them).  Lightly crushed Crispy Crunches are an awesome addition.  Caramilks are versatile. They are wonderful in cookies, brownies and blondies (although in cookies they can be a little oozy).  Mars, Snickers, and Wunderbars (I still see the original commercial in my head…picture historically incorrect vikings, shouting…) totally brownie fodder, AND caramels.  Caramels suspended in rich, moist, chocolate brownie cake… mmm, shivers of delicious delight…  Now that the kids are older and only two are going out for Halloween, and they no longer let me raid their haul, I have to supply my own.  Buying and stashing the Halloween Cadbury mix so that it exists long enough to make into cookies.  Today I am making Crispy Crunch and chocolate chip cookies.  As I am unwrapping them I put the wrappers in a bowl so they don’t end up scattered everywhere.  My children wander through, scavenging for items of easy consumption, reach into the tantalizing bowl of bright coloured invitation, only to discover empty wrappers.  A bowl full of lies, as my son informed me.  It is only a temporary disappointment as there are cookies cooling on the rack.