Quick

As I looked for a recipe once again, I wanted to find something easy and quick. After my last two recipes that I had done, I was still recovering from them. Both of them had taken so long to do and those type of recipes are not my cup of tea. So I found Cookie Sticks under the Halloween section of the cook book. Sure, it's not Halloween anymore and sure, I don't even celebrate Halloween but this recipe can be used in any type of day.

Ingredients: 

1/2 cup vegetable oil 

1/2 cup sugar

1/2 cup packed brown sugar 

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract 

1-1/2 cups all purpose flour 

1/2 teaspoon baking soda 

1/2 teaspoon salt 

1 cup (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips, optional 

1/2 cup chopped walnuts, optional 

(Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes).

As I read through the ingredients and the steps it took to achieve this, I read something at the bottom. Yield: About 3 dozen. (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). 3 dozen cookies, 36 cookies. That was a lot of cookies. I figured that if I cut everything in half, I would end up with only 18 cookies. So I cut everything in half. 

First  I combined the oil, sugars, egg and vanilla and I mixed well. (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes) Since everything was pretty much in fourths, I only had a small amount at the bottom of the mixing bowl. The only thing I had was a full teaspoon of vanilla extract because, well, you can't go wrong with vanilla and the full eggs because I couldn't take only have of an egg. 

After that, in a small bowl, I combined the dry ingredients, the flour, baking soda and salt. (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). I combined the dry ingredients with the wet ingredients (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). Also, remember to preheat your oven to 375 degrees (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). 

When I had combined everything, the dough didn't really look like dough. It was very sticky and runny. So I added in about half a cup more flour and it started to take more shape as dough. The recipe does call for you to shape the pieces of dough into rectangles (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). Yet since my dough was still very sticky, there was no way for me to actually form them. I would just kind of take a handful and then plop it onto a pan with aluminum foil on top of it. In total, I had five cookies. Instead of the eighteen cookies I had, I ended up having five relatively large cookies. If you had wanted chocolate chips or walnuts  atop of it, you would just sprinkle them on top of the dough. (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes).

I set them in the oven for 6-7 minutes (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes). Yet they were probably in there for 8 minutes. When I had taken them out, they were golden brown on the edges. They looked very good and very edible despite what they had been less than ten minutes ago. 

The recipe says to cut with a serrated knife into strips but I figured that if I did that, they would turn to dust so I just kept them in their original shape. 

Question: Is it okay to sometimes change up what's written if you don't know how it'll turn out? 

Citation: (Taste of Home's 2000 Quick Cooking Annual Recipes: Every Single Rapid Recipe from the past Year. Greendale, WI: Reiman Publications, 1999. Print.)