Essay #4: How To Make Chocolate Chip Cookies

           I have liked baking ever since I was a little girl. Not in a career sense, or even a serious hobby sense. I just like to cook food when I'm hungry. I can't cook a lot, and I can't cook anything fancy. I can cook some pasta dishes, pies, cakes, and cookies, I'm really good at making cookies. My favorite type of cookie to make is chocolate chip. There's a certain way you have to make the cookies, that makes them taste the best.
           Step one, start mixing the sugars, butter, vanilla, and eggs together with a wooden spoon. After a few minutes finish mixing them with your hands, but make sure to wash your hands first. Once that is all mixed together add the flour, baking soda and salt. Once again mix with a wooden spoon, and finish with your hands. Pinch off a tiny piece of dough, the size of your finger tip, and squish it between your fingers, if you vaguely feel the crunch of the sugar and salt then you can stop mixing. If you can't mix everything together with your hands and the spoon, then use a beater on medium.
          Step two, adding the chocolate chips, preferably Hershey's chocolate chips. A 12oz bag should be emptied into the cookie dough. Then use the wooden spoon to mix the chocolate chips in with the dough. Don't use your hands because the heat of your skin, mixed with the heat from the fiction will cause the chocolate chips to start to melt. Mix the chips in with the dough with the wooden spoon, (I can't stress that enough), for about 5 minutes. You should be able to look at the mixture and see no chip-free spaces.
            Step three, placing and baking. Use a small dinner spoon to make the perfect sized cookies. Scoop up enough dough onto the spoon to cover it, but not too much that it's more than a few centimeters high off the spoon. Place the lumps of dough about a half inch away from each other on a baking sheet that has been sprayed with a light layer of cookie oil. The oven should be preheated to between 350 and 400 degrees. Place the cookie sheet or sheets onto the middle rack in the oven. Check the cookies after about 15 minutes, stick a tooth pick in the middle of a cookie that is in the middle of the cookie sheet. If the tooth pick goes in easily and pulls out clean, the cookies are done. If the tooth pick comes out with anything other than just melted chocolate then leave the cookies in the oven and check them every 5 minutes until the tooth pick comes out clean.
            Now that the cookies are done you can enjoy soft chocolate cookies that aren't burnt on the bottom, but aren't still raw and gooey in the center. If you happen to have any pecans, walnuts, or anything like that, you can mix those into the recipe as well. Just be sure that you only use 6oz of chocolate chips and 6oz of whatever nuts you put in. Or, if you don't happen to have any chocolate chip, and you're too lazy to go and buy some, but happen to have either peanut butter chips, butterscotch chips, or m&m's, you can substitute those for the chocolate chips. Or if you can't eat chocolate, or aren't in the mood for it, the butterscotch chips taste the best.
           

Practice Final: Public Speaking

I've never been a fan of public speaking, but it never was a big problem until I reached high school. My first disastrous meeting with public speaking in high school was during my junior year in high school. My history teacher was pretty much obsessed with torturing every student in some way. His room soon became my personal hell as every day we were subjected to endless amounts of notes and a deep monotone voice that read them off of a power point. Our final was supposed to be a power point presentation about an organization from the Vietnam war era. I finished my power point a week before the date of presentations and wrote up a whole speech on note cards and proceeded to practice my speech every day for the whole week. By the morning of my presentation day I could pretty much read my whole speech without the cards. Our presentations had to be timed about 12 minutes, and when I had rehearsed at home, I was timed perfectly at 12 minutes. When I got up in front of my class to present, I began to sweat and shake. My whole presentation was about 10 minutes long because I talked faster than I had when practicing and I didn't read a long quote that I had put in as a way to make the presentation longer. All together my teacher had said it was a good presentation though it was shorter than he had wanted. I knew that once I got to college I would have to do a lot of public speaking, so I thought about what exactly scared me about public speaking.
The biggest thing that scares me is that someone will laugh at me. That they will find my whole presence absurd, and that they won't be able to control themselves. I know that there is only a slim chance of this happening in front of me, and if they laugh at me behind my back, it really isn't a problem. But this thought it always at the front of my mind, and I have luckily found one technique that helps me, a bit, to get over this fear. If I look at every person in the audience and focus on one thing about them that I found funny, I would feel a little better. Just knowing that I would be able to laugh at them if they laughed at me helped boost my confidence a bit. It's not a very nice way to cope, and it isn't very respectful, but I figure that if they laugh at me, they aren't being very respectful either.
The second thing that scares me, is that I'll forget a large portion of my presentation or speech. Even though I practice for hours a day, for many days before my speech, the second I get in front of people, I feel like I forget everything for a second. The facts always come back to me right after I get up there, but I often forget some points that I wanted to make. I always kick myself when I finish because I realize that a very interesting fact was left out. I know that no one will ever know this, unless I tell someone, and I know that most people really wouldn't care either. It still bother's me though, because I feel like my teacher knows so much about the topic, that they'll call me out on the few thing that I forget to mention. This has never happened, and I know that most teachers wouldn't say anything in front of other student's anyways, but it still sits their in my mind, mocking me silently.
The last thing that scares me is that I will mess up the pronunciation of words, or mix some words together. This actually happens a lot, and I am normally able to simply back track and say the word over again without it looking like I really care. But inside I'm dying of humiliation, I feel like it makes me look illiterate and not as intelligent as the other people in my class. I know that most people don't care, it happens to pretty much everyone when they speak out loud, your brain moves faster than your mouth and vocal chords. But for some reason it's a big deal to me, and it makes me feel self conscious about how I speak. I often mix up my words when I'm just talking to my friends at school, and no one cares, we laugh about it and keep talking. But when I speak publicly, it shakes me to the core.
So it's obvious that I have never been good at public speaking. Speaking to people I don't know at concerts and open houses? Not a problem, but speaking in front of large groups of people I don't know, and even large groups of people I do know, is pretty much impossible. I stutter, I clam up, and I feel bile rise up into my esophagus. I have found some ways that help make it easier, but I doubt that I will ever feel at home while publicly speaking. I will never enjoy public speaking, and I will never be able to help other people be comfortable with public speaking, But it's human nature to have one thing that makes you uncomfortable. I try not to worry about public speaking too much, and I rehearse for days before a presentation, but no matter what, I always feel nervous before and during a public speech.