Pinterest Test Kitchen: Homemade Graham Crackers

Snow days are great baking days.

After concocting the delicious tried and true oatmeal bar recipe with my little apron-clad helper Piper Finn, we decided to browse through the Cook This section of my Pinterest board.

And we landed on – homemade chocolate chip graham crackers.

Of course – if you follow that link – you’ll notice a gorgeous photo-worthy stack of neatly trimmed, nearly perfect-looking graham crackers filled with tiny chocolate chips.

I followed the directions but when it came time to roll these guys out to a tiny 1/8 inch on the counter between pieces of parchment paper before sticking in the freezer for twenty minutes I realized a few things.

One.  I didn’t have any parchment paper.

Two.  There was no space that large in our freezer currently.

Three.  My mixture did not appear roll-able.  It was pretty extra crumbly.

I was feeling considerably less inspired by the recipe at this point so I jammed the entire bowl in the fridge and left it there until after dinner.

Dragging it back out again and having enough of my mother in me that would not allow me to completely toss the combination of ingredients, I decided to try to fix the problem.

First, I had the kids taste the dough to see if they liked it.  They did.  It tasted a lot like some energy bites we make often.  There are no raw eggs in the mix so I considered simply leaving them uncooked and rolling them into balls for kid consumption.

I decided, however, that I did want to see how a few baked up at least.

Still far too crumbly to roll, I added a little more melted butter in hopes of joining the crumbles a bit better and then I just smashed some dough together and pressed them into rough little rectangular shapes before baking them for the recommended time.  Which, of course, wasn’t long enough since my rectangles were much thicker than 1/8 inch.

Also, as I was pressing and shaping I re-read the ingredients and realized that when they called for wheat germ I put in what was in my fridge – which was flax seed.  So there’s that.

At any rate, I cooked the pressed rectangular blobs for about twelve minutes before removing, cooling and encouraging children to eat them.

Amazingly, the overall consensus was “They’re delicious – can I have another?”

They are not pretty.  They look like a chocolate chip cookies third cousin and they are not at all sweet.  But their ingredient list is clear and simple and the kiddos are eating them.

I don’t suppose that should be considered a total fail, but I also don’t have any plans to attempt these again in the future.