Growing up with multiple siblings can make it difficult to get your share of any tasty food. We had lots of good food in my household, if by “good food” you mean dried lentils, canned green beans, celery stalks, and frozen peas. There was no competition among us for those victuals.

However, once a month Moop would return from the grocery store with a box of Froot Loops, or a bag of miniature Snickers, or a 10-pack of HoHos. Then all hell would break loose. Skirmishes, ripping of packaging materials, gluttonous chomping by the winners, plaintive wails from the losers. 

What I realized, after a few years of this, was that the secret to enjoying a tasty treat was not to win the brawl, but to find something you liked that everyone else hated. That’s what led to the invention of crap cookies.

Thumbing through a cookbook one day, I saw a recipe for something called “chocolate haystacks.” They were delightful little piles of chocolaty oatmeal mixed with coconut, shaped like haystacks. They looked delicious. I attempted to make these cookies one day after school, following the recipe very carefully.

You know how talented I am at making things from scratch, so it may not shock you to learn that the chocolate haystacks I made didn’t look anything like the adorable little pyramids featured in the cookbook. Instead, they were flat little lumps of gunk, looking more like… well, see the title of this story.

What I discovered, however, was that these repugnant concoctions were actually quite good. I ate almost the whole batch before anyone else got home from school that day.

Heff and Dan arrived home at the same time and wandered into the kitchen looking for any edible morsels. Dan saw what was left of my creations, made a face, and kept hunting. Heff just said “eew” and grabbed a slice of American cheese out of the fridge. It was the dawn of a new era for me. I started making crap cookies every day, and no one ever fought me for them.