Little Cookie Monsters

What is it about children and cookies...or as they say in this part of the world, biscuits? They love the stuff! Chocolate chip, raisin, butter, jam, different flavoured creams...even the plain and simple Marie biscuit will induce a smile of such utter joy, that your heart will flip...mooshed-up, mashed-up biscuit slop all over their teeth and gums not withstanding!

I have always found the smell of cookies baking in the oven to be very comforting. Not that my mom baked. It was all pretty much conditioned. The TV ads in America, where I spent my childhood, were so tantalizingly yummylicious, I could actually feel the warmth of the cookies and their heavenly aroma permeate through the TV screen and drug me with thier mere existence. My eyes would glaze over and I'd float off to my happy place, comfortably stretched out on those fragrant clouds created by the wafts of those chocolate chip cookies I so drooled over. I am pretty sure that a lot of the fat I carried with me throughout my tween years has to do with inhaling the sheer goodness of the good stuff.

Well, conditioned or not, my psyche equates baking cookies, the aroma as well as the act of, to purity and honest-to-goodness honesty. And I want to bake loads of the stuff for my two little cookie monsters. I'd be lying if I didn't say that my tastebuds aren't involved in this noble, Supermommy thought of mine...they are. Very strongly in fact. Because you see, I am a cookie monster too...a big cookie monster at that! I love chomp-chomp-chomping on cookies! And none of the namby-pamby, dunk-it-in-your-tea stuff. I'm talking about the flavourful ones full of fatty sin. The melt-in-your-mouth Shortbread biscuits...served with strawberries and cream, ooh! delish! Then the nutty ones...butter pecan, chocolate peanut, walnut and raisin, they play havoc with my tongue...and my ever-thickening waistline! The ooey-gooey-chewey chocolate chips are an all time fave...their mere aroma transporting me to Brady Bunch days of milk and cookies. And the ones that turn me into a selfish, hoarding, no-sharing, un-mommylike monster? The peanut butter and chocolate cookie. Mmmm! Just writing about this is making me salivate! I looooooovvvvvvveeeeeee peanut butter and I am a chocoholic, so if you are going to put my two favourite tastes and textures together, it is no wonder that you are going to get a very happy and very fat, little me! A bite from this wickedly, delectable creation is enough to send me on a high unlike no other! Sigh! It's a good thing andbad thing that they are not available in India. Good, because then these would end up being the only things I lived on and that would mean monthly sessions of liposuction...or worse still -- the gym! Bad, because, sigh, you know, I'm not allowed even a momentary bliss of indulgence!

But back to my boys and biscuits. While the Elder One is rather choosy about what he sinks his teeth into, his latest and only favourite is the vanilla cream sandwich-biscuit. Not surprising really, since he is really into white chocolate and vanilla ice-cream as well. And we are talking plain vanilla ice-cream, not even chocolate sauce! My son?!? How on earth did the chocolate gene miss him? Now the Younger One has no such loyalties and is happy going through all the colourful tins and dabbas displayed on the kitchen shelf. However, over the last week or so, in true younger sibling style, he has only been asking for the ones his big brother loves so well. Offering him any other kind results in his big eyes growing bigger, eyebrows touching hair-line and a look that says, "Don't you know by now?" And to drive home the point, since mamma must be stupid after all, he stresses a very forceful, "Eitaa naaaaaaa!" (Not this!) So I give him his current favourite, the big brother endorsed, vanilla cream sandwich-biscuit, and he rewards me by flashing that big, toothy grin of his and by offering me a bite from his precious biscuit.

This is my morning milk and cookie ritual with my Younger One. Everyday, after I come back home having dropped off the Elder One at school, I sit down with a mug of hot, coffee-flavoured milk (yes, milk! Don't laugh! This is a post-pregnancy hang-over which I have decided to hang on to) and I wait for my little cherub to come flying into my arms so that he can ask me for a "Bikki?"

Ahh! My dearest little cookie monster! For you, anytime!