UPDATE!! My Christmas WMD: still burning

As I posted on the Christmas mishap thread last night, I made a terrible, terrible kitchen mistake yesterday.

I wanted something sweet and had nothing in the house--I had not gotten any holiday baking done AT ALL (that's a whole nother Oprah show) and wanted dessert.

So I decided I was going to try out the baking scale that the kids had gotten me for Christmas. Found a recipe for chocolate Diablo cookies. I love spicy chocolate and couldn't wait to try.

Got all the ingredients out except for cayenne pepper. I had none. No biggie, I can grind some of the dried chili peppers in the food processor, right?

WRONG. SO VERY WRONG.

The peppers took forever to grind because a food processor is NOT a spice grinder. The peppers that did get ground actually aerosolized. Then me, in my infinite wisdom, decided not to use a spatula to get the ground pepper out of the bowl. No, I used my fingers to scrape out all that fine powder.

Y'all know where this is going.

Yep, nose burning from inhaling the powder in the air then face burning because I touched my face after touching the pepper. I should be ashamed of myself. I have been watching Alton Brown and Good Eats for YEARS. I have seen his warnings about wearing gloves when working with peppers. And yet, I completely ignored his warnings.

DH came in to help clean up the kitchen while I tried to stop the burning. He got a Jose full and he started burning Luckily, he realized it quickly and got out as soon as he turned the vent fan on.

So my face burned most of the evening and in the middle of the night I made the mistake of rubbing my eye that itched. Ouch.

Hands are still a little hot today, although I keep washing them with Dawn to get rid of the capsaicin oils on my fingers.

I never did get my cookies. And, to add insult to injury, it never occurred to me, until today, that I could have just made the damn chocolate cookies without the spices and they would probably still have tasted good. Talk about a HUGE blonde moment.

So the moral of my saga is unless you are the host of your own TV cooking show, if you don't have the correct ingredients for a recipe you might want to choose another recipe.
UPDATE:: I fi ally got my cookies made!!! The scale was so much fun to use. It connects to your phone so it tells you what ingredients to add to the bowl and weighs them as you add them to the work bowl and makes a noise when it stop. No multiple measuring cups and spoons. Takes you through each step and has tiner. DD pointed out you can adjust how many cookies you want to make and the app adjusts the recipe for you. So if you wan to only make 4 cookies it will tell you how much of each ingredient to add. My response was "who the hell wants to only bake 4 cookies?".

Anyway, the cookies were amazing, like a spicy brownie, but also crispy. Very gooey but way rich. DD loved them. DS ate one and was like " oh, that's pretty good...oh wait...there's the spice...uh huh...oh my"

Ds isn't a milk drinker, but said a powdered sugar donut took some of the hear away.

Thanks for all the sympathy.