Mom’s cookies versus mine? No contest

A few months ago while at my parents' house I lamented about how if I didn't have mom in my life, I'd only have Stove Top stuffing.

“You don't know how to make mom's stuffing?” my sister Lisa asked.

“Nope,” I said.

Turns out it's not so complicated. There are only three ingredients. In fact, mom put me in charge of making the stuffing for our Christmas meal.

It was good. After all, there are only three ingredients. Even I couldn't mess that up.

Right?

Cookies, on the other hand. That's a different story. My mom makes really great ones. I buy really great ones from the store.

Unless, of course, I'm forced to make them.

When I see she's made cookies I often think back to a bake sale we held many years as ago as a fundraiser when my boys played minor hockey.

When one of the other hockey moms suggested a bake sale as a fundraiser, the idea appealed to me because it didn't involve selling raffle tickets that most of us would have just bought ourselves anyway.

The night before the bake sale I bumped into another hockey mom at a store. She pointed out how it would have been easier for us all to have just donated the money to the team that we had spent on our baking ingredients.

She had a point.

Later that night I was in my kitchen making peanut butter cookies. As I was mixing my ingredients I thought things didn't look quite right. That's when I clued in that I had forgotten to add the peanut butter, which is kind of an essential ingredient when you're making peanut butter cookies.

And not only had I forgotten to add it, I had forgotten to buy it. Back to the store.

Later on, I burnt the first batch of cookies. And the second batch.

A friend suggested we could sell them as hockey pucks. They were certainly black enough to pass as hockey pucks, including the third batch, which I also burnt.

In the end, I had spent about $30 on ingredients and ended up with one bag of cookies to sell for $3.

Thankfully the shortbread cookies I had baked turned out much better. They tasted remarkably similar to ones you can buy at a certain grocery store in town, but I'm sure that was just an odd coincidence.

Or was it?

The next morning we set up our bake sale at the Yarmouth Mall. We had a delicious array of cookies, cakes, breads, fudge, brittles, and more. Plus, my one bag of peanut butter cookies.

It was a feast for the eyes, and the stomach, and in the end it turned out to be a successful fundraiser. Someone even bought my bag of cookies.

One woman, though, came by the table and thought the price we had on another bag of cookies was too expensive. She complained about the $2 price.

“Well, it is a fundraiser,” I said to her.

She informed me she had bought the same cookies at another fundraiser and only paid one dollar for them.

Gee, I thought to myself, that wasn't much of a fundraiser.

I wonder what she would have thought had I told her that since I was $27 in the hole I would have felt completely justified in slapping a $30 price tag on my one bag of cookies?

Back now to the present day, I'll just stick to eating my mom's cookies, although one day I may try to bake her oatmeal chocolate chip cookies myself.

For Christmas, at my sister's urging, my mom gave me a recipe box with many handwritten recipes of our favourite meals that she makes.

The tin box she's housed them in is adorable and the meaning behind the gift made it one of my favourite Christmas presents.

And in case you're wondering, yes, the stuffing recipe is there too.

Good thing because I've already forgotten how to make it.