Rabbit Barf Cookies or "Get That Man Out of the Kitchen!"

If you think this sounds dated, it's because it was originally part of my family's 2008 Christmas letter.



There is this fad around Christmas of putting all the ingredients for a batch of cookies in a Mason jar and giving the jar with baking instructions as a gift. Though my wife may think I exaggerate, I think we had about a thousand of them.

Each recipe required one egg mixed with a little vanilla which I quickly mixed together. Then, I grabbed the first jar that I think was given to us around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, I opened the lid and my nose immediately slammed shut. Rancid? Rancid may just be too mild a word.

"Vile" might come closer.

"Repugnant" is almost there.

The next one I think was a WMD that Saddam tried to hide in our kitchen ... from the first Iraqi war.
Needless to say, they all ended up in our mulch pile which has now been cordoned off as a toxic waste dump by the DEA.

But there was this already premixed bowl of eggy vanilla goodness just sitting there and I had an immediate brain storm. I shall make cookies from scratch!

Bad news.

I didn't follow the recipe properly and my lovely wife had to rescue my culinary attempt by using this industrial mixing bowl that is either for mixing cookie dough or construction area concrete. I mean, this thing is awful in its visage and when you look at it, you know this was a mixing bowl designed by some guy who decided he wasn't going to just make cookie dough. He was going to beat it into submission until it crawled out of the bowl and baked itself in a desperate bid to escape its own misery.

So, I booted up the oven to 375 degrees, and started slapping the dough onto cookie sheets via a rounded teaspoon.

Immediately, Cherie reminded me that I was putting the dough on the sheets in too large a portion.

 "These are Daddy-sized cookies," I told her. "We eat cookies by the fistful!"

My youngest son came down just as the first batch came out of the oven. We looked at the cookies together with more than a little suspicion.

Forgive my crudity, but they looked like some rabbit had a very large and disappointing…accident.

"What are those?" Jared asked.

"Those are…um…cookies?" I said.

"Cookies? Can I have one?"

And to that request, I responded as any typical parent: "NO!"

"Why not?"

"Well … they're made out of rabbit barf," I said, hoping to trigger the gag factor.

However, I forgot I was dealing with an 11-year-old boy. I could have brought out real roast weasel heads on Melba toast and if I called them cookies, he would have scarfed half the sheet down before I could stop him.

Anyway, it took awhile to dissuade him from having a cookie and he is now committed to having one of Daddy's rabbit barf cookies for breakfast tomorrow.

I tried one. Not bad if you close your eyes.

But they do have this funny aftertaste.