Now, anyone who’s seen me lately will know I’ve been going on about work-life balance, job satisfaction and the beauty of physical tasks a lot.  The theory is that working with your hands is good for you, and working in an office (let alone at a meaningless job) is not.  Several people I know are thinking about switching jobs to more physical ones, whether it be dental technician, baker or primary school teacher.  It’s all about feeling like at the end of every day you’ve achieved something and gone home feeling fulfilled, and I’m not sure that office work ever gives you that feeling.  Cooking, for me, is pretty much the only thing that makes me feel positive at the moment (unemployment sucks) and I only wish I had the guts to give it all up and retrain as a baker.

This preamble is leading somewhere, I promise.   A few weeks ago I was given a Kilner jar full of flour and chocolate chips, from Scarlet Bakes.  The idea is to give them as gifts, I guess, so that people can experience the joys of making their own biscuits, without any of the ‘hassle’ of weighing out the ingredients.  I think these things are stupid.  Of all the tasks in cooking, weighing the ingredients is hardly the most difficult.  (To be fair I think these particular mixes are designed for children.  Still, it’s never too early to teach proper baking) What about the mixing, the baking knowledge that comes hard won with numerous silly kitchen mistakes?  But I thought it would be interesting for this blog to give it a go.  I think that Tesco is readying themselves to bring out a similar line.  Plus, I’m not going to lie, I wanted that Kilner jar for a better purpose.

So, the verdict.  The ‘recipe’ calls for only 75g of butter, an alarmingly small amount I’d say, and one which in fact did not yield the ‘batter’ promised.  I added some milk, but a baking novice would presumably not know to do that.  The cookie mixture didn’t taste nice.  The cookies came out of the oven looking pretty similar to how they went in.  And they didn’t taste great, not terrible but not amazing either.  My dad said they tasted like Tesco’s, not something I want said about my baking ever again.

But the worst feeling was that of having cheated, which didn’t yield the satisfaction that I usually get from making anything that I’ve weighed out myself.  I’m vindicated, thank goodness, it would have been awful if they’d turned out better!