White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars

I hope he wrecked his car, says The Child. I hope he goes to jail.

Don’t wish bad things, I tell her. When you send bad wishes into the world, they come back to you.

Wish him his karma, I tell her. Wish that he gets what he deserves.

Everyone does in the end, anyway.

She thinks this is a good plan, and makes her wishes.

We move on to other, more important things: she needs to bring snack to school for one of her classes. We are short on time (I just found out, she says. Tomorrow I need …). I dig through the cookbook shelf and find a book of the very easiest kind of cookies. Bar Cookies A to Z is no longer in print, though you can still get used copies on Amazon. It’s a fun little book and I’ve never had a bad cookie from it.

Instead of bar cookies, says The Child, we’ll make Behind Bar Cookies.

And so we did.

The cookie we chose was White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars, which I thought was just your basic Toll House bar cookie only with white chocolate. It isn’t. Half the white chocolate is melted, so the cookie tastes more like a white chocolate brownie; also, there is no baking powder or soda so the cookie base remains fairly dense.

The original recipe calls for raisins, which we omitted on the basis that raisins just don’t belong in chocolate chip anything. We’re pretty sure there’s a law about that and we’re law-abiding types. We omitted the nuts as well because we were unsure if any classmates had nut allergies. I felt the final cookie would have benefited from the added texture of the nuts; The Child thought they were perfect the way they were.