Making Guess Whats

Every year around Thanksgiving, I pull the Kitchen Aid to the front of my counter and get to work. The smells of chocolate chips, snickerdoodles, and various other sweet scents fill my kitchen and my house. But my favorite cookies to make don’t involve more than a large bowl, a measuring cup, and a few ingredients.

When I was a little girl, I loved standing on a stool and making cookies with my step-mom, my momo. It was one of my favorite activities of the Christmas season. Still there was one type of cookie that my momo never let me make with her.

I’m not sure what the reason was when I was a child (other than it is an extremely messy cookie to make), but as I got older, I was allowed to participate, but never actually place the cookies on wax paper. I loved to stir the melted chocolate and try to sneak tastes as the Chinese noodles were added, making it harder and harder to stir. After Momo took the bowl from me, she would hand me the spatula or the spoon, allowing me to lick it as she took handfuls of the mixture from the bowl and placed them on the wax paper to dry. I always made a face when she would add peanuts to some of them, not liking the nuts and the weird taste that would creep into the crunchy cookies.

I think I was a teenager the first time, I got to help from beginning to end, including melting the chocolate and what I now discovered was butterscotch chips. I had always wondered what made the chocolate taste different, why it didn’t taste quite like the melty goodness of the chocolate chip cookies, but I had never seen the process from the melting, most often coming in as Momo was adding the noodles or had already gotten things mostly melted and mixed.

Making them without my momo was a series of amusing accidents.The first time I made them myself, I overcooked the chocolate. The second time, I forgot the butterscotch chips. But I finally figured out how to make them and I have made them for almost every cookie exchange I’ve had at various jobs. My family calls them Guess Whats, but everywhere else I’ve heard them called Haystacks. If you make them, I hope you enjoy!

Guess Whats Recipe

2 bags of chocolate chips (I use semi-sweet)

1 bag of butterscotch chips

1 bag or 3 cans of Chinese noodles (the crunchy kind)

Cover a flat surface with wax paper.

Put the chocolate and butterscotch into a microwave safe bowl. In the microwave, heat in short 30 second bursts, stirring between hearing cycles (I generally do 1 minute, then 30 seconds).

In a large bowl, dump the Chinese noodles and then dump the chocolate mixture over it. Stir until the noodles are completely coated.

Using either a spoon or your hand, scoop small blobs of the mixture out of the bowl and put them on the wax paper, leaving an inch or two between each cookie. Allow them to dry until hard, then store them in an air tight container (I store mine in the fridge).

Eat once they harden and enjoy!