How the mighty have fallen.

If you're like me (although, luckily for you, you probably aren't) you don't just have a perverse fascination with Junior League cookbooks and recipes involving heavy artillery, like condensed cream of mushroom soup or Cool-Whip™, you also have a perverse fascination with awful-sounding recipes that you've seen over and over and over on boxes of packaged foods. You grew up reading the backs of cereal boxes, and you got into the habit of reading boxes. You spent years reading any box or can you saw. You started to wonder about these recipes you kept seeing--the Dream Whip cake, the Campbell's Tomato Soup cake, and most of all, the Ritz Cracker Mock Apple Pie. What are they actually like?

Yes, I've thought long and hard about back-of-the-box recipes, but never--before today--did I have the nerve to actually cook one of them.

This afternoon I wanted to make cookies--without having to run out to the supermarket to buy any ingredients. I rummaged around the baking supplies cupboard to see what I had on hand. To my surprise, I found a package of Nestle's Butterscotch flavored chips. "Where the hell did these come from?" I wondered silently to myself.

And then it struck me. I could make Oatmeal Scotchies!

Maybe you haven't been as fixated on Oatmeal Scotchies as I've been some people have. But for me many people, Oatmeal Scotchies have been the subject of intense interest.

As the lovely and eloquent Caryn puts it:

"One of our families favorite cookies. I often bake these to take to different events and am always asked for the recipe since they are such a different cookie from the standard cookie."

(By the way, did you know that eating butterscotch morsels kills brain cells? Or that butterscotch morsels consume 48 times their weight in excess punctuation marks? But I digress.)

So anyway, today I fulfilled a long-cherished dream. I baked a batch of Oatmeal Scotchies. I creamed the butter, I zapped the brown sugar to get it soft enough to pack into the measuring cups, I used organic vanilla extract--I did everything right.

Then it was time to add the butterscotch morsels. I opened the bag. They were a bizarre orange color. I put one in my mouth anyway. Ew. The taste was very artificial and vaguely boozey, and the texture was both revoltingly greasy and tongue-coatingly waxy.

I realized what butterscotch morsels taste like: they taste like a Butter Rum Lifesaver enrobed in a tasty layer of Crisco.

I baked the cookies anyway. After all, I had gotten that far. But, as the poet asks, "what happens to a dream deferred?" And I answer, "it vomits up a bunch of cookies."

I took the pan out of the oven. They. looked. like. dog. vomit. See?

Thank your lucky stars that shot was out of focus. Trust me; you don't want to get too close to these things.

And the weird thing was--the recipe actually yielded more cookies than it said it would. When does that ever happen?

Here--take one. These are some of the choicest of the batch, because there were lumps of brown sugar in them. So they give the best technicolor lumps-of-dog-hurl effect of all.
Extreme close-up!!!!!!!


Run away! RUN AWAY!!!!!!!!

p.s. Guess what? My husband loved them.