Monster Cookies really are Monsters!

Julie decided last night after dinner that she wanted to make cookies. OK, not a problem right. She got on the Internet and got a recipe for 'Monster Cookies'. The description described them as "surprisingly simple to make" "especially handy and simple with a stand mixer" "a great cookie to whip up when you need an easy, quick recipe" You get the hint. I thought they sounded great considering Julie has never really made cookies on her own before. We get out the mixer and she starts putting the different ingredients in the mixing bowl. Since she hasn't really ran a mixer before, I did the mixing. When I got the eggs (yup, all 6 of them!), vanilla, and butter all mixed together, I asked her what was next. She said "We need to put in 9 cups oatmeal". 9 CUPS!! OK, so we start dumping, 1 by 1, 9 cups of oatmeal into the mixer. After all nine cups, the Kitchen Aid was starting to slow down, and I was thinking "OK come on Kitchen aid!! Keep going...lets see if you were really worth all $300!" The mixing bowl was full, all the way to the top. So Julie says to me "Umm...I forgot to add the sugars" OK, um, I have a mixing bowl chocked full and you want to add sugar NOW?? So I took Kinley and told her to add the sugars. Julie, being the virgin cookie maker she is, doesn't gradually add the 3 cups brown/2 cups white sugar. She pulls the stir stick out of the mixing bowl, dumps all 5 cups sugar, 1 cup M&M's, 1 cup chocolate chips, and 1/2 cup coconut into the mixing bowl and says "OK, I'm ready for you to come mix" I walk into the kitchen to find this HEAPING PILE of cookie crap spilling over mixing bowl. There was NO room for me to even lower the mixing stick into the bowl! There was no way my Kitchen Aid would mix all of this. It was literally falling out all over the place (see photos below). Julie's only suggestion was "Maybe we should add some milk or water." WHAT?? Yeah we are not doing that! We ended up splitting the dough into 2 bowls and mixing it by hand, literally. So we are already about 1 hour into this process and we haven't even started baking yet! Let me show you where we are at this point:

the spillage, or part of it...

only half the dough...

julie hand mixing...

Not knowing exactly how 'big' these cookies would get in the oven, we decided to do a trial run and put 4 regular sized ones on a sheet and cook them. Well this is how those turned out:

We continued cooking and cooking and trying new things and cooking and cooking till finally at 9:30 we said screw it and put the remaining dough in the fridge. As we started putting the baked cookies in a zip lock bag, it became clear to us that we didn't make 'monster cookies' but rather 'monster granola' because the cookies were all broken into small pieces!

This one we call the 'monster doughnut'!

This reminds me of the time I made cookies for the first time on my own. Trevor and I were living in Moses Lake and he wanted chocolate chip cookies. I was doing really good, until I came to the part of adding 1 tsp baking soda and realized I didn't have any. Well, its only 1 tsp, what can it really hurt if i don't add it? And when the cookies didn't rise and baked as thin as pie crust, I realized that the baking soda was what helped the cookies become cookies! HA, who would have guessed!!