Chocolate Chip Cookies!

I've made the standard plain chocolate chip cookies (the back-of-the-chocolate-chip-package butter, and white flour kind) once before in my life and that was on my 15th birthday. We made 150 cookies that day, and a bunch of the delicious chocolate chip cookies were under-baked but so delicious. I also seemed to enjoy peanut butter cookies then, which I moderately dislike now. I kind of wished I started my food blog when I was 11 (instead of doing the... teen blog thingy), but that's a story for another time. I'll archive all my food documentation someday.

I made plain chocolate chip cookies again, this time with SP (the boyfriend). Although they were absolutely delicious (as most chocolate chip cookies go), the bottoms were a tad singed, and I blame it on the oven. The oven is kind of small (much smaller than the one I have at home, so my cookie tray doesn't fit into the oven...not even diagonally), and it heats up really fast. It has no timer, and a dial for setting the temperature, instead of digital buttons. I can't run upstairs to check whether a sweet, crumbly perfume lingers in the air. These are all not necessarily bad differences, and I suppose I have to adjust my cooking style accordingly.

The WORST part, however, goes like this:
Me: ...and you can't open the oven door while a cake/cookies is/are baking, because then the batter will just fall down and won't rise anymore.
SP: But how do you know when it's done?
Me: You look in the window thingy, with the [oven] light on!
SP: But there's no...
Me: *Looks* OH NO. OH MY GOSH NO! NO WINDOW!!!

I also made some chocolate cake for myself and SP from a bag of cake mix left behind by the previous tenant. We dug in while watching Pinky and the Brain. I don't generally use prepackaged baking mix or the atrocious frozen pre-scored cookie dough, unless I happen upon them for free.

(Note: Angry lashing out at society is in next paragraph) 

Am I snobby for looking down on over 12 year-old people who bake solely with baking mix, then brag or post pictures of their photogenic food captioned with "Made these homemade cookies by myself!"? I get even more enraged when I see comments from other people, praising the person for his/her cooking skills or "original" recipe or whatever revelations. For instance, this just angers me to no end. It's merely prepackaged cake mix and oil and eggs that bake into cookies. A comment from the page: "Can you believe this recipe only has 3 ingredients?!?! It is AWESOME. My husband said they were the best cookies I ever made."

First, there are plenty more than THREE ingredients! The cake mix itself probably has around 20, including HFCS, PHO, vitamin E (tocopherol) and colouring -- how else does it have a shelf life of two years?! Despite the fact that prepackaged-mix cookies do taste nice sometimes, homemade ones always taste better. ALWAYS, unless you're bad at following instructions, but even then, the cookie dough is delicious. I understand that baking mix is useful for people who don't have flour and baking powder sitting around, and culturally accepted and loved in the U.S. (brand names...), but I believe that REAL/ASPIRING cooks WOULD have these ingredients in the house, and they TRULY care about making quality food.

Also, how do you mess up making simple cookies anyway (cakes and pies are definitely are more irksome)? You don't even have to follow the simple "Mix wet stuff. Mix dry stuff. Incorporate using figure-8 spoon mixing." instructions! You can just dump all the listed ingredients into a bowl, stir like a mad person, and then bake...

Finally, my first attempt at scrambled eggs resulted in a perfect boat of creamy cholesterol. I followed this video, but my eggs were frozen (very back of the fridge) and I used oil and milk instead of butter and creme fraiche, respectively.