Welcome to the Fifteen Minute Novel. Each morning I spend fifteen minutes writing on a singular story line. Each morning starts with the last line of the previous day. The goal is to get a (very) rough draft out of the simple story idea and to avoid letting the story idea languish in limbo forever, actually writing it out. This is the third year I have done this writing experiment and each year I learn just a little bit about myself and the way I write as well as creating a framework for the story. But without further ado…
Day 120: She raised her hand.
She raised her hand. He looked at her.
“Yes?”
“Because it is easy to mess up something you think you know well?” she guessed.
The instructor smiled. “Exactly,” he said. “I’m betting that all of you knew what a chocolate chip cookie was when you walked in here. I’m betting that even if by some miracle tyou have managed to live your life this far without consuming a chocolate chip cookie, you have seen many different variations in many different places, from the supermarket aisle to television or even in an actual bakery. Perhaps you even saw them being made at home. And I am willing to bet that the concept of a cookie is not a forign one either. I’m betting several of you thought it would be really easy because oit was just a cookie. Sometimes it is the most familiar items that we take for granted. We think we know them and so we don’t pay as much attention as we should.”
He moved back to his table and Gwen saw that a small white plate had been placed there. She wondered if he put it there himself or if his mysterious assistant slipped in when she wasn’t looking.
“So I want each of you to go to the cabinet and get one of these plates. Then I want you to put your best cookie on it. One by one, each of you will be called forward and we will discuss your results.”
He slid a cookie from his cooling rack onto his plate and looked at them. Slowly they all moved towards the waiting cabinet. Gwen picked up her plate along with the others and returned to her station. She stared at her row of cookies. The looked pretty much the same as she used the same leveled off scoop to portion them out.
‘Maybe one from the middle because it would have cooked the most evenly?’ she guessed.
Gwen chose her cookie and put it on the plate. She then waited as the first person was called up. He was the one with the flour explosion and his cookie was wide and flat. As his plate was presented the instructor went over the details. He reminded them that ratios mattered and that when he lost some of the flour the ratios were off. He then had less flour than he planned and therefor more of the ther ingredients like butter, which hadn’t flown everywhere.
“A little puffing up of the flour is fine, but if you lose a large quantity of it, the loss will affect your baking.”
One by one each of them came up and presented their cookie. Each received a comment on their cookies. Two were graded as perfectly acceptable for the bakery. Gwen noted down all of the comments and suggestions, trying not to grow nervous a it was time for her cookie to be judged. She was the last to go and she took a deep breath when she picked up the plate and walked forward.
‘It’s just a cookie,’ she thought.
Gwen placed the cookie on the table. Her plate was next to the instructors. Her cookie showed a bit more chocolate than his did, but that seemed to be the main difference. She looked up at him.
“After you added the recommended amount of chocolate, you added more,” he stated in a voice that carried throughout the small classroom. “Why?”
“I thought that there didn’t look like there was enough chocolate for the batter,” Gwen answered.
He nodded and broke the cookie in half. He studied it before taking a bite. He chewed. He swallowed and he put the rest of the cookie down.
“It is good,” he began. “But consistency is important in a bakery. You don’t want one person to get a small cookie and one an extra-large. Likewise you don’t want someone to get a lot of chocolate and another a lesser amount. If you increase your chocolate in one batch you are going to have to increase it in all of the batches. Which of course brings us to costing out our ingredients.”
He looked at Gwen and smiled. “But as we haven’t gotten to that yet, this was a very good cookie. And I like that all of the cookies on your tray are consistent. Well done.”
Gwen nodded, picked up her plate and went back to her table.
Ten til Midnight 