cooking for class

I'd promised my Memory class home made cookies ... and because we'd been talking about Food and Memory recently, it seemed only apt to make some cookies that make me think of home - home, that is, meaning my parents' home, the home of my childhood, and all the occasions - wet Sunday afternoons - that I made these over the years I was growing up.   And I have a fail-safe recipe: cream together

2 sticks butter
1 cup confectioners' sugar

add a teaspoonful of vanilla essence

cream in 2 cups all purpose flour
two tablespoonfuls chocolate powder - preferably Cadbury's Drinking Chocolate
and add a handful of chocolate chips

Bake at 350 for 13-15 minutes

... though I'm not quite sure that these are the exact same quantities, because I grew up using pounds and ounces, and talk of cups always has me rushing to the back of The Joy of Cooking.

However.   I didn't exactly plan ... and because of Alice and my self-imposed boycotting of the Highand Park Stop & Shop this year, there was no dashing out.   Indeed, I didn't plan at all ... so confectioners' sugar was replaced by soft brown sugar, and vanilla by some cinnamon and chipotle chili powder, and the chocolate powder was Green and Black's, and the chocolate chips had to be hand carved from a bar of dark chocolate.   So they didn't quite taste like I had wanted - no madeleine factor.  I could have pretended that they were an ancestral recipe, but instead of which I told the class that although I knew where the recipe is written down (in my best nine year old italic handwriting, in a green paged recipe book my mother keeps), I don't remember where it came from before that.   I've emailed my mother to ask ... and have also asked her to write the origin of other recipes into the recipe book, if she can.   Where, for example, did she get the recipe for what I remember as a perfectly delectable butterscotch pudding, even though I don't think I've tasted it for forty years?

.....

Note for Lynn: I only cook for classes smaller than 20!   But yes, you were in a small seminar, and so ... I owe you not just an apology, but, I guess, some cookies.