The night before a Christmas cookie swap, I was mixing up cookie dough and decided to use some of the opened bakers chocolate stored in the spice cupboard.  First mistake, the chocolate tasted like all of the ingredients it had been stored with.  Second mistake, mixing the dough with a Kitchenaid paddle that was losing it’s plastic coating.  After removing the paddle from the dough there was an even larger area of exposed metal than when I started and it ended up in the cookie dough.  The obvious remedy was to search through the cookie dough for the large piece of white plastic and throw it out, pretending that the cookie dough is still edible.  Unfortunately, the plastic had been pulverized into tiny, white, grains by a very efficient Kitchenaid mixer.  This brings us to the moral dilemma of swapping cookies with unsuspecting friends, when I know that they will be consuming plastic but they don’t know it. That would be the third mistake.  Once baked, the cookies had an essence of spice cupboard to go along with the plastic.  So, being the last-minute, resouceful, moral person that I am, I will throw out my cookie dough and buy sugar cookie dough from Uncle Ralph’s.  Pink sugar decorations add to the homemade appearance. Then, if my unsuspecting friends want to swap amusing stories along with their cookies they can read my blog.