"When baking, follow directions. When cooking, go by your own taste."

– Laiko Bahrs

Well, I guess I didn't follow Bahrs' directions for baking, which are to...er...follow directions.

I was flipping through my copy of my grandma's cookbook the other day and decided to try to make Chocolate Bittersweets. I think this recipe was actually my great grandmother's, passed down to my grandmother at some point (and that's not to say it was an original recipe of hers either, as many of the recipes in the book came from other family members, and a couple were even taken from the sides of boxes). I'll preface this by saying these things are far from bitter, so the name doesn't really reflect what they are. I'm also not sure what category they belong in. Cookie? Minicake? Something else entirely? Here they are.

In any case, I noticed that I had all of the ingredients to make the cookie/cake part and most of the ingredients for the icing, but I didn't have the coconut or cream cheese for the filling. I'm not even sure how that works, by the way: how do you put filling and icing in/on a cookie or cake? Well, the problem was solved when I decided to go ahead and make them with just the icing. But I had to improvise on the icing because I didn't have chocolate chips to make it. So I used...

And it worked wonderfully.

Does anyone else like to cook or bake? I'm certainly no expert, but I do enjoy it, especially when it's a recipe from my grandma's book. What problems do you run into? Do you like to improvise? Because I feel like I do it all the time, sometimes because I don't like what's included in the recipe (like the nuts in Chocolate Bittersweets) so I leave that particular item out, other times because I feel like I'd like the recipe better with something else added. In this case, I took a risk using Nutella instead of chocolate chips, because while Nutella is fantastic, it is very different from actual chocolate in terms of taste, and in this case, it is also a completely different consistency (a spread) than chocolate chips (which are hard). Luckily, the chocolate had to be melted anyway, so it worked out. In short: Nutella can be used to make a really great icing, if you're a Nutella fan. You just have to be okay with a hazelnut taste in your chocolate.