Summer break is nearing its end and Adrian’s friends are returning to town, and he is most happy to spend time together with them again.

His friend F has been hanging out in our house a lot. They play Minecraft together, build Legos, or go out playing Pokemon Go. When they run out of other activities, they bake. Both of them really like chocolatey things so they have baked a mud cake, chocolate muffins, and now chocolate cookies.

Friend F has nearly no experience of doing anything in the kitchen. Adrian, compared to him, is a pro baker. Adrian supervises, follows the recipe, weighs and measures, while F enjoys the more physical acts of breaking the eggs and stirring the batter.

The aftermath of their baking sessions is usually an astonishing mess. After the mud cake (or maybe it was the muffins) they cleaned the kitchen, then I cleaned the kitchen one more time, and still I kept finding small splodges of batter in various parts of the kitchen for more than a day.

This time the mess was more contained but still quite impressive. One step in the recipe suggested working the dough together with your hands. The boys did this using all four of their hands. Before long they had more dough on their hands than in the bowl. They were wise enough to call for help at that point, and I managed to scrape most of the dough back into the bowl.

The cookies came out delicious.