Pamela’s Products Chocolate Chunk Cookie Mix

As you may have picked up, my office was open over Memorial Day weekend; we worked both Saturday and Monday. With out disclosing too much information, we received new goods that needed to be catalogued and entered in our computer system in time to be shipped on Tuesday afternoon.

Who am I kidding? My bosses had an opportunity to purchase cultured pearls from Fiji and we are now the only company in the US that deals directly in Fiji pearls. These are amazing! The colors are fantastic! It was a lot of work, but we were successful and I got to play with lots of pretty pearls.

As a way to help buck-up my coworkers I promised to make cookies. It’s amazing how many ills a fresh baked cookie can cure. Pamela’s Chocolate Chunk Cookie mix was easy to prepare, as are most mixes. I was worried when I tasted the batter because it was very salty. I decided to bake the cookies anyway and hope for the best.

The box says that the mix, prepared as directed, makes 18-20 cookies but I got almost 30 since I made them small. I only cooked them for 9 minutes rather than 15 and they turned out just fine. Nice and moist and chewy. Not salty at all.

The cookie mix itself has cocoa in it, so they’re darker then straight chocolate chip cookies and they have nice big chunks of chocolate. I’m glad I made more, smaller cookies since every one wanted some; from the bookkeeper to the jewelry contractors to the security officer at the front desk. Everyone who got to try one said they were great.

I like baking from scratch, but sometimes that’s not feasible. Especially when a recipe requires a small amount of special ingredient. These were quick, easy and super tasty.

Glutino Vanilla Wafer Cookies

I finally got home from my trek to Trader Joe’s. It’s a 3+ mile round trip from the Subway station to my closes store. All that for 1 pound of raisins, two pounds of walnuts and a jar of sea salt. The things I’ll do for good food and a good deal, not to mention a little extra exercise on a beautiful spring/summer afternoon. My legs felt like pendulums, pumping away, even though I’m sitting now, they still want to keep going.

I guess that hike balances out my splurge of last week. In the middle of a very busy, very stressful week I had a moment of weakness. Well, really, the weakness lasted more than a moment, but it only took a moment to open the box of Glutino Vanilla Wafer Cookies. Luckily my office mates are adept chocolate scavengers and they handily helped me polish of this box of cookies. And let me tell you, we NEEDED chocolate last week.

These are vanilla wafer cookies with vanilla cream, coated in chocolate, and they are divine. The cookies are light and crispy and the vanilla cream really is creamy. The chocolate coating is just a bonus. As a youngster I used the deconstruct wafer cookies, for some reason I liked they way they came apart. These were so good, I wanted to eat them just the way the were. My memory may be a little fuzzy, but to me, these were much better than the wafer cookies I remember getting in bulk from the local Meijer store that were always dry and saw dusty tasting.