It'll Be Selling Like Hotcakes

BOO!

Get it? I'm the ghostwriter for my son's new work-in-progress, The Official Cookbook of Sixteen-Year-Old Males. Hope I didn't scare anybody. But here's something that IS scary: the first recipe.

NUTELLA COOKIES

• 1/2 cup flour
• 3 giant spoons of Nutella (supposed to be 1/2 cup, but Nutella is impossible to clean out of the cup)
• 1 scoop sugar
• 1 cap milk
• 1 egg

Apparently, you just set these ingredients out on your cutting block and they automatically turn themselves into cookies. Because that's all Genius wrote down for his recipe. The ingredients. Excuse me for a moment while I contact the chef for clarification.

Cook at 350 for seven to eight minutes. Put them on a tinfoil sheet. On a pan. Mix ingredients in a bowl until the consistency of slightly dry cookie dough. It might be slightly crumbly. Form them into a ball and flatten the ball with your hand. Space them an inch apart. Let them cool enough to solidify. So they don't fall apart. Like a normal cookie. Take a bite. Make your mom take a bite. Yell at her when she spits it out. Proceed to eat three more cookies. Don't throw the rest out to the dogs. It'll kill 'em. The chocolate. Not the recipe.

Seems that boy watched the "The Betrayal" episode of Seinfeld one too many times. The backwards one. Where Jerry, George, and Elaine go to India for Sue Ellen Mischke's wedding. Must have been that bra on the outside of her sweater that drew him to it.

I did inquire about some measurements. Not for Sue Ellen Mischke, but for the ingredients. Giant spoons are of the serving spoon ilk, not the big wooden spoons that some folks cross with big wooden forks and hang as decorations on their kitchen walls. A scoop? No clue, really. Perhaps a pink plastic half-tablespoon, which resides permanently in our sugar canister. The one cap of milk stymied me. A baseball cap? A thinking cap? Bottle cap? Newsboy cap? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. It's the blue plastic cap off the half-gallon 2% plastic milk jug. Silly. How could you not know that?

I don't think Bobby Flay will be challenging Genius to a throwdown. I have tasted these cookies (technically, a cookie), and the flavor is indescribable. The closest I can place it is burnt flour with a dusting of cocoa powder. The texture was like, if your made a mudpie, and let it sit in the blazing sun all day, but you didn't mix if very well, and the center was dust...a crumbly hard-shelled mouthful of powder.

I'm shopping for a publisher. Does anybody know if there's a book of recipes from preschool kids on how to bake a Thanksgiving turkey? Because that would be right up our alley. We could be the companion tome, for desserts. And maybe the occasional snack of a baloney sandwich with only one green spot.

Here's the refined picture for the cover.

I think Genius might better utilize his talents to photograph magazine food. Beautiful, but inedible. There's another project. A coffee table book, with that very title: Beautiful, But Inedible.

I might as well give notice at my day job.