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Health & Fitness

Flour on the Floor: Disney & Chocolate Chip Cookies

Disney is a heady mix of commerce and joy like no other. It is also my home. I grew up in Orlando, in the long shadow of a water tower shaped like Mickey Mouse's ears.

When you walk down Main Street USA at Walt Disney World, you are met with the smells of freshly baked goods. The notes of vanilla, butter, and chocolate conjure still-warm from the oven chocolate chip cookies. There is some alligator part of your brain that will respond to these scents and you will feel like you’ve come home from a long school day to find your aproned mother smiling as she pours you a glass of cold milk—even if that scenario never existed in your actual childhood. That’s what the Imagineers (the fancy name for the people who designed Disney) want—for you to feel at home. Of course, they also want to sell cookies.

Disney is a heady mix of commerce and joy like no other. It is also my home. I grew up in Orlando, in the long shadow of a water tower shaped like Mickey Mouse’s ears. I spent my childhood in a place where tourists dead-stopped mid-highway to examine their maps; where family and friends visited not out of love but out of a need for cheap lodging; where “let’s go to the park today” never meant swing-sets and slides.

A map of the parks reads like my life story. See here, the Japan pavilion where my ex-stepmother worked for years, from the very day it opened. Her friends would greet me with “Konnichiwa Pam-san” and stuff my pockets with pulled-due-to-defect Hello Kitty trinkets, making me feel welcome and different all at once. At the Carousel of Progress my dad surprised me with a pricey new Mickey Mouse sweatshirt that, even then, I knew he couldn’t afford; the attraction is still here though its progress is as frozen in time as my father.

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This spot, in front of Cinderella’s Castle, is where I watched Christian rock bands perform at Night of Joy when I was in my “trying on religions” phase. The People Mover is where I made out with my high school boyfriend during all of the ride’s dark parts—after I abandoned my religious phase. And here, circling this man-made lagoon is the World Showcase where my future husband and I drank around the world—beer in Germany, wine in France, Sangria in Morocco—then mashed cultures together with a drunken impromptu Hora in Mexico.

Disney was a constant for me—a place I could count on during moves and school changes, my parent’s divorce and subsequent re-marriages to other people, my father’s job failings and my step-mother’s outbursts. The smell of those cookies is the thread that stitches my happiest memories together.

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This week, I decide to bake a batch using a recipe from Baking Illustrated called “thick and chewy chocolate chip cookies.” My daughter and her friend are eager testers when it comes to comparing chocolate chips—milk versus semi-sweet. We diverge on our assessment with the girls preferring the overt sweetness of milk chocolate while I enjoy the subtle cocoa bite of semi-sweet. Though I am out-voted, I’m the only one who can read the chip packages, so we use semi-sweet ones in our recipe. The girls add, mix, stir and sample like pros. We eat three cookies-worth of dough each.

The recipe has us roll the dough into balls then twist each ball—like one would an Oreo—to crack it in half. This reveals the jagged insides that will now form the tops of our cookies. This recipe doesn’t make smooth, flat, polite circular cookies; it creates tall, dangerous, mountainous ones with slopes of melted chocolate. We bake until the cookies are a light golden brown and our kitchen oozes the cooked chocolate smell that is the hallmark of my Disney childhood.

I visited Disney with my husband recently, clutching our children’s hands instead of cocktails. In the weeks before our trip, my husband forwarded me a presentation that he received from a consultant friend; it consisted of twenty PowerPoint slides and was entitled, “Disney World Optimization.” It was the first time that I realized that planning a trip to Disney is very different from living next to it. It sent me into a frenzy of information-gathering—reading books and asking friends for advice. By the time we left, I had a detailed list of each park’s attractions and shows divided by our children’s names and separated into the parts “lands” thus minimizing walking and “optimizing” our experience.

I had a plan to pack it all in; what I had forgotten was that just being at Disney is to be over-stimulated. Every one of your senses is delighted or attacked. On the first day, my son cried—big, fat, real tears—because there were simply too many choices. I worried that his only memory of the trip would be that of being overwhelmed. We went back to the hotel for a midday nap.

While it’s easy to reduce Disney to a to-do list, our best moments were those unplanned. One night we went to “Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party” at the Magic Kingdom—an event you must buy tickets for well in advance—to find costumed kids waiting in candy lines longer than those for rides. But I was also treated to the unexpected pleasure of seeing my mother-in-law clad in bunny ears, tail and bow tie, standing right alongside those kids holding out a bag for candy.

When my in-laws took our youngest back to the hotel for bed, it left my husband and me with a few unexpected, unscheduled hours with our son. We rode Space Mountain twice, shot at the targets as well as each other in Buzz Lightyear, and rode the People Mover when we tired (no make-out sessions this time). On our last day, we ditched our entire theme park plan and goofed around in the hotel pool and arcade then had a rousing round of putt-putt. It was simple, unforced fun.

Ultimately, bringing my children to Walt Disney World felt like driving them through my hometown. And as so often happens when visiting home, when it was time to leave, we were ready. A flight departing Orlando looks very different from one arriving. On the way there, kids are chattering excitedly and parents are alert and engaged. The plane going home features tired children, their mouse-ear hats askew as they drag new Princess and Cars backpacks on the floor behind them. The parents are non-entities, too worn-out to intervene or deal anymore. There is an audible sigh when the plane takes off.

When we arrive home, it takes a solid week to get caught up on everything: unpacking, tasks, sleep. On every stress scale I’ve ever seen, there is a list for you to mark the major (potentially-stressful) life events from your past twelve months—divorce, death, job change, moves—and I am now convinced that “Disney” should be added.

And yet, a few weeks out, I find myself considering a return trip. It helps that my kitchen now smells like Main Street USA. The girls and I eat still more of the chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven, risking burns from the pockets of scalding chocolate specking the cookies. They live up to their title’s promise of thick and chewy.

When my husband comes home from work I present him with one and say, “Just like Disney.” He takes a bite then off-handedly asserts, “You know they pump that smell in right? It’s fake.”

It turns out that the cookies scent is prefabricated and bottled then delivered via a complex system of pumps, fans, and vents. It’s like I just caught my dad in a Santa suit—I always had a hunch but didn’t want it confirmed.

Then the irony of it all strikes me. For me, the smells conjure Disney and thus home, yet what I am re-creating has been fabricated. Meanwhile my children and I are creating an actual memory here in the kitchen tied into aprons and “toasting” our cookies by knocking them together before we gobble them up. This is what my children will remember. And it is real.

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