First official kitchen disaster

i decided to bake some cookies yesterday while watching little women at home. it must have been the preciousness of my chosen movie. feeling all meg-and-marmeeish, i sent marlon a syrupy text message, promising to welcome him home from the office with freshly baked walnut chocolate chip cookies. 

it's a good thing i didn't promise him a specific number of cookies, because all i had for him was a plate of four cookies. which we would have to share. 

because this is what happened to the rest of the batch.

the first half-dozen fell victim to a mis-conversion from fahrenheit (the package instructions) to centigrade (our oven). the second batch turned out perfectly -- they were the lucky four that ended up on the plate i presented to marlon. i left the third batch in the oven for a tad too long after the timer went off (you think it's easy to tear yourself away from christian bale??) and they just continued baking until... (see above).

marlon took it pretty well.

he just laughed and insisted on documenting the whole thing, saying he felt strangely relieved to finally have had a kitchen disaster. then it hit me -- a newbie cook like me, going six full months without ever having had a culinary catastrophe until this? i must be doing something right!