Victory!

In the past year, I have thought often of a beloved moment from 30 Rock. As captured in countless memes across the interwebs, the brief exchange goes like this: Liz Lemon, comedy writer and noted tired person, asks her boss, “What a week, huh?” The boss, Jack Donaghy, responds, “Lemon, it’s Wednesday.”

“Lemon, it’s Wednesday” sums up how I felt last March, when a year’s worth of pandemic news dropped in the 24 hours surrounding the diagnosis of Tom Hanks and subsequent shutdown of the planet. It encapsulated my feelings on January 6, when I and all of us asked of 2021, “What a year, huh?,” only to be reminded we hadn’t even finished the first week.

Spending a year in “Lemon, it’s Wednesday” mode is exhausting. I’d like a slow news day! I’d like a vacation! I’d like to leave my house.

But with none of those things on the horizon, I’d accept a small victory — and this week, friends, I got one.

The latest recipe in 100 Cookies was for Chocolate Crinkle Cookies, an oldie slash goodie but not a recipe I’d made before. I hoped they would go well, and, to my utter delight, they did. At long last, my execution of a cookie from this book wasn’t “okay” or “fine” or even “a weird disaster.” It was great.

In a way, these ended up delivering on what I’d missed with the Brownie Cookies. The dough puffed up beautifully in the oven, landing me with thick, pillowy cookies packed with deep chocolate flavor. (An aside: the flavor may have been extra, um, complex due to my slight scorching of some of the chips I melted on the stove. We will call this an enhancement and not a mistake.) So far, I’ve found a few recipes from this project that I’d make again if the moment called for that style of cookie, but these I would make again without any prompting. At last, dear readers, these were a win.

Like, look at that spread. A winner if I ever saw one!

If you’re looking for a way to recreate such a triumph in your own home, I would highly recommend investing in a select number of kitchen upgrades. I impulse-bought some lovely new cookie jars last week, and, in the week before, my mother staged a long-distance intervention that replaced my nasty old cookie trays with new ones from Williams Sonoma, complete with silicone baking mats (thanks, Mom). These new toys may or may not have affected my baking, but they certainly improved my mood — and that fancy-person spirit, I believe, catapulted this latest batch into the realm of fancy-person results.

Ariana Grande’s “Successful” is pumping through my earbuds right now, and if you need me, I’ll be in my snowed-in apartment, listening to it and basking in my sweet victory.