If You Bake Them, They Will Come

I've got good news and I've got bad news and I don't know which is which.

I made cookies this weekend and, as usual, did not follow a recipe exactly. This batch contains a secret ingredient I've never used in cookies I've brought in to work before. I won't divulge the ingredient until after I've gotten feedback from the people brave enough to eat cookies without knowing what might be in them. It's kind of an indirect test of trust, paranoia and one-track-mindedness. Almost as if I shot this ingedient through my Johari Window and it landed in my cookies.

Whether this is good news or bad news depends on whether you have and want access to the cookies.

Update (7-24-06 13:36): People have finally started eating the cookies. This morning, no one would touch them. I'd put this experiment right up there with Stanford Prison Experiment or the Milgram Experiment in terms of importance to the psychological community.

Some further information that leaked out (is that a pun?) this morning:

Co-Worker: Is there anything harmful in them?
Me: There's no cyanide or poison or anything in them.
CW: Is it a food product that people normally eat.
Me: People eat it.
CW: Do sane people eat this product?
Me: Sane people have eaten it.

There is conjecture on whether the ingredient is actually food or just something that people eat. There is conjecture that the ingredient was added by accident (e.g. it fell off a shelf into the mix) or was added by an animal (e.g. rat droppings). It has been suggested that "you could get pregnant" eating more than one.

General concensus is that nobody tastes anything different about these cookies. Some feel that since they taste like my other cookies, my secret ingredient has failed.

The "known" ingredients are: flour, oatmeal, butter, eggs, white and brown sugar, peanut butter, vanilla and chocolate chips/chunks.

I'd say that this has turned out much more interesting than expected.

Update #2 (7-24-06 15:34): As I've gotten feedback from everyone who might eat the cookies I can reveal the ingredient. It was margarine.

What happened was, I only took one stick of butter out of the freezer to defrost even though I need two. Since I didn't want to wait for another to defrost and I didn't want to risk defrosting one in the microwave I just used half butter/half margarine in the recipe. Apparently, this had no effect (at least none that could be detected in a normal setting).