Cookie Reviews: Erin Baker's Breakfast Cookie

It is a well established fact that Toaster likes cookies quite a bit. You may even go so far as to be able to call him a connoisseur and you'd not be inaccurate. To better guide your cookie eating through his own experience, Toaster offers the following cookie review:

The other day I had missed the bus and I was hungry, so I walked over the the nearby drive-through coffee house looking for quarters and saw that they had a sign for "breakfast cookies". Now, I eat cookies for breakfast sometimes anyways, so this was nothing novel, but the official legitimization thereof was. As the baked goods that this coffee house sells are normally excellent, I figured I'd give it a shot.

I was presented with a pre-packaged choice of Erin Baker's Peanut Butter, Oatmeal Double Chocolate, or Oatmeal Raisin Breakfast Cookie. Normally I'd go with an oatmeal raisin cookie over most anything else any day, but figured today I'd go for the double chocolate as I'd only slept 2h the night before and could use the extra sugar and chocolate-borne theobromines as stimulants.

It turns out that Erin Baker's Breakfast Cookies are edible.

The cookie itself was moist, chewy, and firm, almost everything a cookie should be (also needs crumbly), but it managed to get their respective parameters mixed up. It was too moist, too firm, and too chewy. There was no crunch to this cookie whatsoever, not even a hint of that perfect outer crustiness that I seek. It was also very dense. I had expected unusual density because it billed itself as a breakfast cookie meal replacement, but this was pumpernickel in the realm of baguettes. Furthermore, despite this being a Double Chocolate cookie, it still managed to taste like peanut butter and the chocolate chips tasted like soy carob despite the ingredients claiming real chocolate.

Examining the packaging more closely, it turns out that this was the dreaded oxymoron Healthy Cookie. No butter in it at all. Just a lot of molasses, special organic wheats, and weird juice extracts instead of sugar. Now, I can understand using raw cane juice or unrefined sugar in a cookie, but relying solely on cane sap and pear extract as sweetener is contrary to the spirit of cookiedom. And it had fiber. Lots of fiber. Toaster is fine with lots of fiber as most everything that is not a cookie, burrito, Tabasco, or whiskey that he consumes is vegetable or whole wheat, but this was like having an ingot of sawdust sitting in my belly for a few hours.

Erin Baker's Breakfast Cookie:
Texture - D
Taste - C
Idea - B+
Cookieness - D

Note - I am going to review other cookies in the future, and I will strive to only do so with brands available in most of the United States or, if homemade, only when I am also able to post the recipe.

The War Intensifies

It would appear that I have made a grave mistake in underestimating the absolute sinister capacity of Hermitage. Either she is far more wicked than my initial intelligence reports led me to estimate, or I have divulged too many of my personal weaknesses on this blog and she has unscrupulously taken advantage of them.

In either event, what she has done is so...so...fundamentally despicable that I feel a bitter moral vomit rising, although that could just be my wounded ego. For what it's worth, even if it was heinous of her, I have no choice to admire her deft cunning.

What has Hermitage done?


She CAPTURED me! Like a motherfucking flag!

I fully admit that her evil brilliance coincided with unusual foolishness on my part, but in my defense it should be noted that one can't help their fundamental constitution. Cookies are to me like mashing is to potatoes, like bacon is to beans, like LB broth is to E. coli K12. Hermitage knew this, and she took advantage of this. I can't blame her.

You see, she made a cookie and put it in my daily pathways on a PEDESTAL! A pedestal! As a cookie connoisseur, I can't very well pass such a thing up. I fell right into her trap as she lay in hiding, waiting with a baseball bat. She waited until I was distracted by the cookie, then snuck up and BLAMMO! with the baseball bat on my oversized noggin (she could hardly have missed if she'd tried to).

But that's not the worse of it. I didn't even get the cookie before being knocked out because she GLUED IT DOWN!

I woke up strapped into a chair with a headache and a haircut (srsly, WTF, Hermie?) in an OPEN GRAVE.

But it wasn't just an open grave, it was really a giant 2% agarose gel. And she was stomping around in the background, I could just make her out through the agarose walls. She backed a tumbler truck up to the well and promptly flooded it with 1X TAE. She was going to electrophorese me, but being a compassonate megalomaniac, she granted me one last request*.

Naturally, I asked for a cookie.

She had no choice but to oblige.

So I sneaky-like crumbled the cookie up and spit it into the TAE buffer. This saved my life because when she flipped the switch the salt concentrations of the buffer were so screwed up that nothing happened. You see, I know from what Hermitage has revealed on her blog that she is a terrible cook and limited to Ramen and as such there was a 50% chance that she'd mix up the sugar and the salt. Luckily for me, she did. Also luckily for me, nylon rope frays in TAE buffer and I was able to escape.

Revenge will be sweet. Oh, so sweet indeed.

*Regardless of compassion, she was required to as set forth in Section 7.29 of The Nerd Accords.

Cookies

Figure A: This IS a cookie (we'll come to the converse later).

Today I am annoyed. I'm tired of not being taken seriously and having to explain myself to collaborators who don't bother reading my Methodology write-ups (do I seriously need to start diagramming these things in my spreadsheets?) to understand the data I share with them. I am tired of collaborators who keep coming around to our isolated little lab looking for results when it's too early for anything to have grown. I am a technician, and yes, I am powerful, but I am not a Master of Timespace. I cannot force bacteria to grow faster, and nor can I make a predict the outcome of the experiment from the first sampling time point. I have done this experiment now what...5 times? And today, today at the first time point of the newest iteration of this same experiment, you tell me that you're not sure the antibiotic concentration is optimized!? You tell me this after I have poured ~300 media plates? For real? You know, when you perhaps should have probably at some point realized that you should test all new strains with antibiotic resistance for their optimal antibiotic concentration. Just sayin'.

I don't like repeating things like this just because the data aren't what was wanted. I don't like wasting mice (germ-free, no less; although that's pretty much all we have) and time and money. And I'm sick of doing quantitative culture. Sure, I can do it accurately without thinking, but still: it gets kind of old.

But today I got a cookie. One of the animal techs had brought some chocolate chunk cookies to an earlier meeting, and she let me have one of the leftovers. It was one of those store-bought cookies full of delicious chemicals to keep it soft and chewy and non-crumbly (guar gum, I think...). So I am going to distract myself by writing about cookies.

First, in praise of cookies:

Cookies are delicious. Of all the delicious sweet foods out there, I believe that cookies are the best. Even with doughnuts, baklava, pulla, bagels, cake, pie, ice cream, pastries, scones (WTF is up with scones, anyway?), zalaybees, cupcakes, etc. out there, cookies reign supreme. There are few things in life better than a warm, soft cookie. Chewy and just a little bit crumbly. Throw in some chocolate or dried fruit and it is wonderful. That moment when you first bite into a fresh cookie and it has that crumbling crust that you bite through into the sweet softness inside is bliss.

Figure B: Toaster as a young child.

You see, when I was young I was a chubby child. I was the kind of kid who maxed out their library card and got tired of the children's section at 8 and the young adult section at 10. I was pudgy, and looking back I realize that at the time I didn't really realize it. I wasn't chubby because I ate cookies all the time (I was chubby because I was, and am, too clumsy to play outside much and I lived in the South with all the wonderfully terrible-for-your-health food), but they were certainly present , and the memories of them are indeed fond. I am no longer chubby, but that chubby kid is still with me, screaming for cookies (and M&M blizzards)...

Now, to throw down on faux-cookies:

There is an important difference between cookies and crackers. Cookies are sweet and chewy and wonderful. Crackers are hard and stale and are still crackers whether they're sweet (Animal Crackers) or dusted with salt and garlic (Triscuts). So stop calling those puny motherfuckers parading as cookies cookies! If you need a "cookie press" to make it and it's crunchy, it is NOT A COOKIE (and yeah, I'm looking at you, Nilla Wafers)!

Figure C: This is not a cookie, and if you insist on calling it as such even after reading this, I will personally find you and come kick you in the face.

We call graham crackers "graham crackers" because they are crackers. We call animal crackers "animal crackers" because they are goat fucked crackers. The only time that it is appropriate to call a crunchy, stamped, baked crackers a cookie is if it has soft filling (a la Oreos, although this may be recidivist hypocrisy on my part, because I do really enjoy Oreos). Call the scabby little bastards anything else, but not a cookie! Call them crackers, wafers, thins, butt crack peelings, whateverthefuck; I don't care! But not cookies.

You see, dear wider society, you've already squeezed all the goodness out of Saturday morning cartoons. You stopped playing good cartoons as soon as I was old enough to want or be able to buy my own cable. And the few good ones that even played after that are now canceled! So you listen to me here, you dusty, boogery bastard, you are NOT going to take cookies away from me either! I mean, shit, Cookie Monster himself now eats vegetables and fruit! What else are you going to corrupt? Are My Little Ponies going to get fashion accessories and Bratz BFFs? Is Dora the Explorer going to get a makeup kit? You've already turned Oscar the Grouch into a wuss, so stop already. Today's kids are going to grow up to be as bland as belly lint, only they'll be able to string together a text message.

Today it is cookies, tomorrow it is our very souls!

An existential question:
Do you think that the traditional cookies of any given culture are reflective of the values of that culture? Furthermore, do you believe that one's favorite cookie could yield insight into their personality? For reference, the best cookies I've had so far have invariably been oatmeal chocolate chip, even better with chopped walnuts and dried dates or something.

Aside: Perl

I am trying to learn how to code in Perl. I am doing this because I find computational biology and mathematical modeling of biology to be intensely interesting. However, writing meaningful programs is currently a bit beyond my abilities. So, I submitted a variant of this as a joke to Thinkgeek. I thought I might post this for all of your enjoyments/amusements.

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Who is awesomer (you/me)? ";
chomp($base = );

if ($base eq you) {print "Correct, you can has cookie.\n"};
if ($base eq me) {print "Fail.\n"};

If you should wish to actually run this program (for whatever bizarre reason), then:
1) Copy-paste into Notepad or a simple text editor (not MS Word).
2) Save somewhere you'll remember it at.
3) Access the folder you stashed it in from your command line using the \cd function.
4) Type "perl filename" (filename = whatever you named it) and it will run (this'll work natively in a Unix system [Mac]{I think}, might be more difficult in a Windows environment, where you'll need a Perl module installed).
5) If you want to alter it to help boost your self-confidence or momentary feelings of awesomeness, then you can alter the pieces following in bold.

#!/usr/bin/perl

print "Who is awesomer (you/me)? ";
chomp($base = );

if ($base eq you) {print "Correct, you can has cookie.\n"};
if ($base eq me) {print "Fail.\n"};

For it to work, red has to match red and blue has to match blue, letter for letter. And the space after the question mark is important, so don't delete it.

I think this qualifies me as a script kiddie. Which I don't think is too bad, considering that I'm trained as a molecular biologist and all.