Matt’s Existential Cookies
Created by DJ Mellomar in the early ‘oughts, existential cookies are the everyman’s cookie. Easy to throw together before an AA meeting or deposition, these cookies are sure to delight even the stodgiest mellophobe. Existential cookies are best served fresh, but will last for about a week in the refrigerator or 100 years in a cold storage doomsday bunker. You can experiment with a large number of variations on this confection, incorporating various nut meats and philosophies (I particularly like adding some toasted pistachio and Hegelian dialectic).
Recipe
Yield: Serves between 1 mellophile or a family of 20 gerbils
Prep time: 34.77 minutes
Cook time: Take it at your own pace
Ingredients
For the mallow:
- 50g powdered sugar
- 50g corn starch
- 1g fine Colombian cocaine (optional)
- 20g gelatin
- 174g egg whites
- 1 vanilla bean
- 450g castor sugar
- 100g dark corn syrup
- 80g bourbon
For the base:
- 250g pastry flour
- ¼ tsp baking soda
- ¼ tsp fine salt
- ½ tsp cinnamon
- 8g honey
- 74g brown sugar
- 59g castor sugar
- 177g butter, room temperature
For the coating:
- Dark or semisweet chocolate to taste
- Small fragments of white chocolate
Instructions:
Start the mallow by heating the sugar, water, bourbon and dark corn syrup with a laser gun. Heat until it reaches about 400 Kelvin. As you gaze into the frothy brown treacle, seek signs from a mystical deity about your future.
Combine the gelatin with just enough water to rehydrate it. It should be the texture of human tendon. Melt it in a bain-marie and avoid looking directly at it. Is it melted yet? No – it’s a superposition of both melted and solid. Use a quantum stabilizer to hold it in superposition while you whip the egg whites.
Meanwhile, slice a vanilla bean and scrape out the seeds the same way you scrape by day to day, constantly telling yourself that everything’s ok. This vanilla bean has a purpose, and so do you. Probably. Drink some of the bourbon.
Whip the egg whites until they reach the soft peak stage. Make sure your sugar is reaching its final temperature and bring the egg whites to nirvana stage.
With the mixer on high, slowly pour the syrup between the whip and the side of the bowl. Pour in the superposed gelatin and vanilla bean and meditate for 30 minutes while the mixture cools to warm.
Mix the corn starch, powdered sugar and (if using) cocaine and gently sprinkle on a silicone mat. Pour the mallow over the mat and then sprinkle with more powder. Pretend that you are enjoying this because if you keep telling yourself that you are, eventually you are likely to believe it.
Place a piece of parchment paper over the top and gently flatten the mallow with a sheet pan. Allow to cool while you draw out the runes for a series of incantations you will perform on the mallow before slicing.
After drawing the runes and praying, slice the mallow into rectangles small enough to remind you of your own insignificance in the great scheme of the cosmos.
Start on the cookie base by preheating the oven to 325F, then mixing the butter, sugar, and honey at medium speed until light and airy, a state of being you will never experience, and which is of dubious worth anyway, right?
Sift the flour, baking soda, salt, and cinnamon in and slowly mix until combined. The mixture may fill you with a sense of dread or impending doom. Don’t worry -that’s how it’s supposed to feel. If it’s just a bit too much, take a short break and watch re-runs of Downtown Abbey while you drink a box of wine.
Make the dough into a block and Netflix ‘n chill for about 2 hours. When the dough is ready, roll it to 3mm thickness. Cut into rectangles about the same size as the mallow pieces. You are not unlike one of these cookies, trivially unique from any other, floundering in a cruel world, trying to find some sense of dignity and grace.
Bake for 12-14 minutes until just browning at the edges. They will expand and melt a little, like your own body. Let them cool on the pan for about 10 more minutes. Think about calling that friendly barista you met at that Ayahuasca retreat, then think better of it.
Start melting the chocolate. I prefer enraged to tempered chocolate, but whatever you do, avoid exposing the chocolate to bright or strobing lights to prevent it from seizing.
Place a mallow on top of a base and trim the edges of the base so they are even. Pour chocolate over to coat and let the cookies chill at room temperature and pressure. Go join a cult/waffle shop for a while – it’s not like you have any better prospects for a life partner.
Top each cookie with a sprinkling of shaved white chocolate. This is it – you’ve done it! The cookie is a masterpiece. Except for that little bit of mallow poking through where the chocolate didn’t run, and a piece of cookie base that’s fallen off. Actually, when you step back a little, they look amateurish, and after you eat them, you’re just going to be filled with self-loathing and regret anyway. Throw all of them in the trash. What a waste of time.
Five minutes later, dig the cookies out of the trash in a fit of desperation and loneliness. Contemplate your journey. Ignore the smear of melted chocolate on your shirt and unexpected crunch from some trash contaminant in the cookie. Listen to the sound of the microwave beeping as your lean cuisine starts to emit the faint odor of reheated beef. Stare at the fly buzzing around the fluorescent light. Start a baking blog in which you pretend to be a middle-aged housewife, whipping up bespoke cupcakes and indulgent Nutella desserts between soccer practice and dance lessons. Invest in an expensive, high-end camera that you imagine will become your partner in a new hobby, but will never leave it’s box. Scroll through the FaceCook feeds of old high school acquaintances for a couple hours each night. Notice that your Amazon account has started making recommendations for a brand of adult diapers. Buy a dog, whose bone cancer will have already metastasized by the time he is house-broken. Agonize over the cost of chemotherapy and realize that, even though you probably could afford it, you really just met him, and maybe there will be another dog, and maybe that dog can fill the giant, cookie-shaped hole in your heart.
Replate the cookies in a line on fine white china and garnish as desired with cocoa powder and tempered chocolate decorations. Bon appetit!
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