The night before Valentine’s Day I decided to make some chocolatey treats.

I chose a recipe wherein you bake a hollow “cup” made of dough, then fill that with chocolate mousse and a few raspberries, and let it cool and harden. Then you cap the thing by dipping the top in melted chocolate and letting it dry and harden again.

I thought to myself, “Come on Jo, you’re a crap cook. You can’t make an omelet. This is way too ambitious.” So I decided to be wise and make some heart-shaped chocolate chip cookies instead.

Well, I managed to mess that up too. See, chocolate chip cookie dough is really sticky, and it’s not the type on which you can use a cookie cutter. I only realized that as I was trying to spoon the stuff onto the baking sheet and it wouldn’t come off the spoon. I then tried using my fingers, but only got my forearms, face and sweater were covered in chocolate chip cookie dough. And it wasn’t even kinky.

Put the heart-shaped cookie cutter around one of the little glops of dough, hoping that as it cooked the dough would spread and fill the cookie cutter.

I put too much dough in it, though, and it ended up making a thick, soft, heart-shaped chocolate-and-butter sandwich. And about six big, respectable chocolate chip cookies.

Took me too long to make the second batch, though, and the dough had hardened. So the glops didn’t spread as they cooked, even when I left them in the oven longer. I was left with charred balls of dough.

Eventually, the heart-shaped chocolate-and-butter sandwich hardened. It would probably be inedible, but it was cute.

An evening of cooking, 24$ worth of ingredients, yielded a chocolate-and-butter sandwich, six ok cookies and eight charred doughballs.

But strangely enough, T loved them. He was even disappointed I threw out the charred ones.