Charlie performed in the musical Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He played Charlie's friend, James. It's a part no one really knows before seeing the show, but he was basically the next largest kid part after the 5 main kids. It was a great introductory role to theater, he made some good new friends and he had a great time! He performed very well, and I think he has definitely caught the acting bug.
For the cast party, they did a pot luck, and Charlie wanted to bake cookies himself. He's made cookies before, but I usually helped him. This time he woke up early to make sure he had time and was determined to have as little help as possible. The only advice I gave him initially was to make sure to cream the butter, sugar and eggs really well before adding the flour.
He got a little confused right off the bat looking at the directions since I told him to start with the butter. I said, "Oh yeah, they always tell you to mix the flour and stuff in a separate bowl, but I usually skip that part and just add that stuff later." That turned out to be a mistake, but we'll get to that later.
The butter and sugar went off without a hitch. Then he got to the eggs, and his first egg landed half in the bowl and half on the counter-top. So he ended up with 2.5 eggs instead of 2 - not a big deal, but you could tell it was runnier than usual after adding the eggs.
Then he added the flour. As he was mixing in the last little big, I looked at the measuring cups he used and asked, "Did you use this cup for the 1/4 cup?" "Yes," he replied. "This is a 1/2 cup." Unfortunately, our 1/2 cup has a little lip half-way down that says 1/4 c. so he thought the whole thing was a 1/4 cup. So...too much flour, but we still weren't worried. We added a little extra butter to try to balance things out.
Next, I got a pan of 16 cookies ready to bake and put them in the oven. As they were baking, I told Charlie about a time I accidentally put 1 Tablespoon of soda in my cookies instead of 1 teaspoon, and they turned out terrible. He said, "Was I supposed to put soda in those?" Turns out, when I told him to skip mixing the dry ingredients, he got to the "add the flour mixture" part and just put in flour, skipping the soda and salt. We figured we'd let them cook and see how they tasted, but I wasn't too optimistic. We added soda and salt to the rest of the dough and mixed it as well as we could and hoped for the best.
The next mistake was my fault. I confused the soda-less cookies with the new ones because the ones without soda looked less done (even though they had been in the oven a full 10 minutes longer), so I pulled out the "good" cookies thinking they were the bad ones before they were done backing. It took me a minute to catch my mistake and I tried baking them longer, but they ended up a little stickier than they should have been.
In the end, we ended up with 10 good cookies, 16 slightly undercooked cookies and 16 edible-but-definitely-sub-par cookies.
On the bright side: Charlie learned A LOT about how to make cookies! And his other cast members enjoyed them so much, he's now convinced he's discovered the secret to making the perfect chocolate chip cookies. He made another batch to bring to the last performance and replicated it exactly - down to the extra half an egg, the little bit of extra butter added after the flour and the soda/salt added after the chocolate chips. I advised him next time that he really should put the soda in with the flour to avoid soda pockets, but he didn't seem convinced.
