An Ode to Measuring Spoons

Saturday night I found myself Googling "how to eyeball a teaspoon." I had gone over to my boyfriend's house in downtown D.C. for a Valentine's date before Valentine's Day, fully intending to get my kitchen goddess on and make the best chocolate and java buttercream-filled sandwich cookies he had ever tasted. Unfortunately, I forgot that he owns nothing in the way of measuring spoons, and rather than cooly dashing salt here and pinching baking soda there, I instead had a kitchen full of failed measuring experiments.

I tried converting ounces to tablespoons to teaspoons and immediately gave up. I tried milliliters (I know, that's just for liquids) to tablespoons, and even coin sized conversions. At one point, I had cut an ounce of butter into three equal parts to try a visual comparison. None of it worked.

Well, it worked in the sense that I had cookies that tasted good. It failed in the sense that the cookies were a bit chalky and the buttercream filling is better suited to topping ice cream.

I can't decide if the chalky cookie is because my butterstick-to-teaspoon-of-baking-soda comparison was way off and I put too much baking soda in the cookie, or if I messed up in some other egregious way. Does baking soda do that?

It's also possible that the cookie was meant to be a little dry and crumbly since it was filled to bursting with delicious java buttercream.

Either way, my boyfriend didn't care. He ate two cookies sandwiches for breakfast Sunday morning before his bagel and eggs.

What do you all think? I feel like chocolate cookies would be a little tough anyway since chocolate burns so fast. How do you keep yours more moist and chewy?

Lesson learned: measuring spoons are useful things to have.