I made these chocolate chip cookies over the weekend. Apparently Laura prefers thick and chewy over thin and crispy, so we made the thickest and chewiest cookies we could find. The recipe came from Baking Illustrated, and was simple enough: combine the flour, salt, baking soda and baking powder in the food processor. Beat the sugar into 1 egg + 1 yolk. Add melted butter and vanilla. Combine with flour mixture, and finally stir in a heaping load of chocolate chips.

The tricky part: the technique which yielded the great texture on top of these cookies. After rolling the dough into a ball, split the ball in half and stick the two halves together so that the rough edges face upwards. Then place on a baking sheet.

These cookies were awesome, of course. They didn't last very long though, and were still wonderfully fresh even 4 days later. (Is 4 days a long time? I don't think so!) The only bad part? I only managed to get 12 cookies out of the dough. I probably made them a little too big, as the recipe was supposed to yield 18 cookies.

I played a $13 super-satellite Sit-n-Go tournament last night. Once a table of 10 players fills up, we play no-limit Texas Hold'em until one player is left. And last night, that player was me!

It was quite exhilarating, and best of all, I don't feel that I had to get lucky to win. I played some very solid poker and really concentrated on playing my best hands as well as possible. Its true when they say that nobody really pays attention as you fold round after round: you will still get action when you come in with KK or AA.

The tournament started off very fast, one player was out on the first hand, and the second on the third, thanks to me. Starting off with so many chips was fairly fortunate, as it allowed me to chill out a little while and pick my spots to be aggressive. The rest of the game was fairly static. I would fluctuate between 1st place, to as low as 2nd to last.

Once the game got down to 4 players, I was able to extend build up my stack to about 4500 chips (out of 15000). Once the 4th player went out the ending came swiftly. I kept on folding and then I got dealt KK. The low stack raises, I reraise, he raises all-in, and I call. It turns out he had QQ or JJ or something like that. That put me up to over 9000 in chips, a commanding lead going into heads up. It didn't matter though, because not 2 hands later: KK again! I think this time we were all-in on the flop, with no A in sight. Turns out he had QJ or something like that, so the ending was mercifully quick.

The next step is to buy into a scheduled $100 tournament. This is a more substantial tournament, 150+ players. The winner(s) of that tournament get a free trip to Aruba, plus a buy-in to the WPT tournament there. I'll be sure to report back here with my results, although I don't plan on participating for a little while yet.