My First Dance (& Other Tales from Highschool)

In Which I Get The Cooks' Secret Cookie Recipe

With Thanksgiving coming up, the cooks had boosted up their skills and started making even more delicious meals for us. I didn't see one student with a packed lunch the entire week. Everyone wanted some of what they were cooking, but their main courses weren't the most iconic part of why everyone wanted to eat school lunch. The best part of their dishes was the cookies.

Nobody had ever tasted such divine goodies! Some people claimed their moms or grandmas could outdo the cooks, but none of them could back themselves up. In truth, they knew deep down that the only improvement was the nostalgia of a family recipe. Had they done a first test of both, they'd always go for the cookies made by our school cooks. They were just that good. Even better was the variety in which they baked! My mom and I made cookies for different holidays, but we'd never made as many different ones as the cooks did, and that was cumulatively! There were sugar cookies and iced cookies, gingerbread and chocolate chip, fruitcake and no-bake. There were so many different ones that the student body made a game out of which kind would be for lunch. And each day in the cafeteria, we'd draw a right answer from the hat, and whoever was drawn would get their lunch first, and thus had first choice in cookies.

I was determined to figure out what made their cookies so good. Not once had they dropped in quality, not even when they deviated from traditional cookie flavors. They had to be doing something special to make their cookies the best in the whole world, and I wanted a part in it. It wasn't that I wanted to make knockoffs and profit off of them or anything (though it definitely did cross my mind a few times). I really just wanted to satisfy my curiosity, and maybe be able to recreate them at home so my family could enjoy them during the holidays. Call me a copycat baker if you want, but I guarantee that if you tasted those cookies, you'd want to replicate them too!

I figured they wouldn't give up their recipe easily, so I started scheming up a plan that weekend. Sienna and Vick and Sydney were all with me, trying to help in my cookie expedition. "Why don't you just sneak into the kitchen and find it?" Sydney questioned. I gaped at her, stunned that she'd have the balls to suggest it.

"We can't steal from little old ladies!" Sienna broke in, saying exactly what was on my mind, "We have to get it ethically!"

"Ethically would be asking," Vick replied coolly, putting an arm around Sydney.

"Well, yeah.." I sighed out, rubbing my cheek. It felt like we were just going in circles, making no progress on an actual plan. Nobody had any good ideas for how to figure out the cookie recipe, and when someone did, it was shut down by the group for one reason or another. It was starting to seem like the mission was going to be a failure before my mom walked in with grocery bags..

Bingo! An idea popped into my head, one that might take longer than expected but one that had to be foolproof. "I know what we have to do," I announced, gaining the attention of the rest of my girls, "We're gonna do trial and error! That's what Mr. Mo always says to do when we can't figure out a problem on the quiz." Mr. Mo was our math teacher, and he was one of the coolest guys in school. He always wore these funky ties to class, and even though he could be sticklers for school rules, he was a really chill guy. He let us play learning games in his class and was always there to lend us a helping hand when we had academic troubles. He was the first guy any of us would go to when we needed to talk to someone, and he was the last teacher in the building because of his habit of supervising club activities.

"I get how that applies to math, but how's it apply to making cookies? There's like, a bajillion combos," Sydney puffed, "I don't wanna be baking forever!"

"Be an optimist," Sienna replied, slapping her lightly on the back, "We'll find it eventually I'm sure! We just have to find some of the most popular recipes and compare them to the cookies at school."