We all have that fail in baking from time to time. Sometimes it's overdone brownies that no one wants to eat. Or a cake that's way too dry. In our case, this time, the "fail" was intentional, a batch of intentionally "bad" cookies, for a class assignment.
One daughter had an assignment to make 50 "beautiful" things and 50 "ugly" things for one of her classes. She chose to make cookies. For the 50 "ugly" things, she burned some, made them misshapen, and some she sprinkled with black pepper.
This tin of cookies sat in our pantry for almost a month. I was concerned they might mold. To my surprise, no mold, just really hard cookies.
I set out to salvage what I could from them. I used a serrated knife to cut off the tops of each cookie.
Then I crushed them coarsely with a large spoon in a bowl. I added some melted butter, a sprinkling of sugar, and dumped the whole shebang into the bottom of a baking dish. (The sugar and butter are optional. I added then to conceal the off-putting flavor and texture of these cookies.)
After dealing with the cookies, I made a batch of scratch cornstarch pudding, butterscotch-flavored. While that was still hot, I poured it over the cookie crumbs.
After allowing to cool, I put the whole thing into the fridge to chill.
I wasn't going to try any, due to the milk thing, and my bad track record with milk. But my daughter raved about it. So, I had to have some, and then some more. Good thing I took a pill. Yeah, pudding, it's my one weakness.
Honestly, this is one of those homemade desserts that no one could guess was a concealed baking "fail". I've done this with brownies, topped with chocolate pudding, and cake topped with jam and vanilla pudding. I think of this as poor man's trifle.
An aside, about scratch pudding -- do you all have a good recipe for cornstarch pudding? Do you know how to turn plain pudding into butterscotch? For butterscotch pudding, use dark brown sugar in place of white sugar, skip the vanilla extract, and at the end, swirl in 1 tablespoon of butter.
