One of these bits just doesn't belong here

I decided to make home baked cookies for our Dads for Father's Day. Simple enough, and worth the little bit of effort on my part because both the Dads love sweets, particularly homemade ones.

I chose a diabetic friendly oatmeal date recipe for my Dad (which I've made before - it works really well and he loves them) and a chocolate, orange and pecan biscotti for my father-in-law.

Having never made biscotti before, I was anxious to try that recipe first. So I did.

What followed was a classic Kristin-style baking fiasco.

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy, sometimes I don't even know why I bother trying.

Everything went swimmingly at first. Had all the ingredients, had the patience, had the inclination, had the time. Also had a really old spatula. Uh oh.

I measured, I mixed, I beat, I chopped, I cracked, I added, I poured, I beat again. And at the end of it all I used the old spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl and get off every last bit of dough off the beater. Then I formed the dough into logs to freeze for 20 minutes, as indicated, and set about to clean up my mess.

Which is precisely when I noticed that the tip of the old spatula was missing a piece of plastic. It was in tact when I started - I knew it was. The partial amputation happened during the biscotti making process - and I don't know when. Did it happen when I was scraping the sides of the bowl or when I was cleaning off the beater? Or did it happen after all contact with the dough ended - when I was rinsing off the batter leaden spatula?

I dunno.

So I sat down and watched TV, my possibly contaminated dough logs freezing happily in the freezer.

I waited until My Beloved came back from the barber to see what he thought I should do. I know the logical thing would have been to throw the works out and start again, but I used up all the chocolate and all the oranges I had in the first batch. And then there's the whole starting again issue. Because I was fast running out of patience and inclination and still had my Dad's cookies to make.

When he got home and heard my tale of culinary woe, My Beloved kindly suggested throwing out the dough. He didn't want to risk giving contaminated cookies to his father.

I hate that he's such a good son.

I suggested that maybe if I looked through the dough really carefully I could find the plastic, and if I didn't, we'd know it actually had gone down the drain. He was reluctant to accept my plan, but also loathe to disagree with me, since I think I was whipped up into a pretty good frenzy of cookie despair by that point.

Which is how I found myself pawing through two logs of very sticky biscotti dough trying to distinguish chunks of pecans and chocolate from errant spatula bits. Cursing inwardly all the while.

In the end, I didn't find a thing and baked both dough logs, then sliced them and re-baked the cookies, turning them into the most delicious biscotti I've ever tasted (if I do say so myself). They neatly filled the cookie jar we bought to put them in, with the exception of one delectably large specimen that I decided My Beloved and I would split for dessert.

Which we did.

I know you won't believe me when I tell you this, but I swear it's true (you can ask My Beloved - he's The Ess Space in my links). When I popped the last bit of my half of the biscotti into my mouth, I chomped down on the missing piece of spatula. The gods saved it for me. Which is actually a good thing, I suppose, because now we don't have to warn the in-laws about foreign objects in their cookies. None the wiser works for me.

Unless, of course, they read this.

And in that case, L and P, please accept this public apology for giving you pawed through cookies contaminated with plastic spatula bits. I will completely understand if henceforth you refuse any and all baked, cooked or in any way pre-prepared gifts of food from our house. If you'd rather I just share the recipes and perhaps buy the ingredients from here on in, just let me know.

You know, it wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't already made them cake with rancid icing a few years ago. I'm 0 for 2 so far...