BEHOLD!

I give you the Worst Peanut Butter Cookies Ever Baked In The History of the Entire World.

Yes, I know it's a long name. That's probably why the cookbook abbreviated it to "Classic Peanut Butter Cookies."

But trust me on this one. Unless the desert Bedouins have been making peanut butter cookies in precisely this way for thousands of years or something, this recipe is neither classic nor a cookie. They taste, as the description says, but as I didn't think one was supposed to take quite so literally: sandy. And I'm not talking the good kind of sandy, as if they were made with ground nuts and thus are pleasantly crumbly. I'm talking the kind of sandy that you get when your slightly health-nut mother, in 1977, runs out of the rice flour she is using for the Carob Cookies she is making and therefore chooses to make her own rice flour by submitting actual rice to the rigors of the food processor. Which? Doesn't really produce flour but rather something more along the lines of edible buckshot. And then you politely eat one of the cookies, which is both a sorry excuse for chocolate and a sorry excuse for a cookie, tasting as it does as if it were baked on a beach in the midst of a hurricane.

Fortunately, your mother has a good sense of humor in 1977, and the Carob "Cookies" don't have to be eaten but rather are allowed to become a long-running family joke.

Sadly, these Peanut Butter "Cookies" aren't even ripe for joking. They are dry without being delicate, crumbly without being toothsome. The recipe actually calls for adding OIL in addition to the butter and peanut butter, and yet they do not hold together. They are highly caloric without being satisfying. Even the chocolate chips, added back when the whole gleeful affair was one happy family romp in Baking Heaven, didn't melt properly.

But don't they look nice all stacked up there on the plate?

Don't be fooled. When a cookbook that, for the sake of discretion, we'll just call The Oyjay of Ookingcay tells you a recipe is a "classic," apparently that's code for "column filler alternate recipe that any dufus who can read would know better than to try because OIL? in Cookies? HA! Suckers."

At least we had some wholesome family fun fighting over who got to pour in the chocolate chips and who got to do the stirring first.

(Husband just looked over my shoulder as I was writing this post and said, "Are those your delicious cookies there? They look much better in the picture than they taste." I rest my case.)