Flour on the Floor: Homemade Oreos and Sleepovers

This week we have Oreos and sleepovers—both quintessential parts of an American childhood. My eight-year-old son hosted his friend for an overnighter and I attempted to make them a homemade version of Oreo cookies. Their happening went much better than mine.

In my son's second grade class, the sleepover scene is just getting started. Though he first asked about going to a friend’s or having a friend over for the night way back in kindergarten, I wasn’t ready. And by the way, if you’re tempted to look online to see at what age others start sleepovers, my advice is this: Don’t.

You will find as you start typing “slumber party” into Google, that it will want to finish your sentence with “massacre.”You will also find discussion boards with parents who worry about everything from the quality of the television their children might watch to the junk food they’ll likely eat; and still others who perform background checks on the hosts and area pedophile searches. It is all patently unhelpful (though fascinating sociologically).

EARLIER: 

Sleepovers seem to be the natural extension of our children’s ever-increasing desire to spend time with their friends. It is growth and that is good; sleepovers nudge friendships along. The later hour offers a different context for the sharing of secrets and good times.

My own childhood is full of happy sleepover memories. My first slumber parties were in the third grade with my friends Kim and Kathy. We played “light as a feather, stiff as a board,” read the dirty parts of Judy Blume novels, and attempted to summon the ghosts of dead movie stars. They tried to contact Marilyn Monroe while I called out for Mae West who I’d seen in all her curvy glory at a wax museum that summer—an ad for womanhood like none I’d seen (after all, her shape is said to have inspired the design for early Coca-Cola bottles). And in case you are wondering, the “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” exercises featured in “Are you there God, it’s me Margaret?” do not work. Sigh.

Later, teen sleepovers involved less pretend and more real-life hi-jinks in the form of prank calls and sneaking out to toilet-paper homes. My friend Dana and I would call random numbers (ah, those innocent days before caller ID) and say, with all gravity and seriousness, “The eagle has landed” before collapsing into a heap of giggles. We also called every boy we crushed on and immediately hung up when they answered.

These were what girl sleepovers looked like; “slumber parties” conjure a distinctly feminine experience. But what do boys do at such events? My husband’s childhood sleepover memories involved glimpsing his friend’s naked mom and discovering that if he held 4 and 10 down on the cable box, that he and his friends could access the Playboy channel.

When my husband and I were buying beds for our children’s rooms, I made the case for a full bed for our young daughter on the grounds that later she’ll want it for sleepovers—so the girls can fit in the same bed, I explained. He offered the opposite point for our son’s room which now holds bunk beds. It was news to each of us that these events could look so different based solely on gender.

But when I look more closely at our memories, I see a theme emerge unrelated to boy/girl stereotypes. We were all straining toward that something called adulthood. We were snatching at that little bit of freedom, thrilling at a single night away from the protective, but often confining, places we called home. The making of unmonitored phone calls, being out past dark, glimpsing adult bodies—we tried all the things we thought real, live grown-ups did. And the very next night, we got to rush back into our mother’s arms and tuck back into our own beds, safe and sound again (if a little wiser).

Heading into my son’s sleepover, I vowed to undress behind locked doors and to keep an eye on their screen access (parents now have computers as well as televisions to worry about).

I use the event as an excuse to bake a treat. I attempt to recreate a cookie which itself was an attempt to recreate something else—Oreos are a 1912 American riff on the British tea biscuit (NaBisCo actually stands for National Biscuit Company). Not satisfied with crispy dry chocolate biscuits, the creators added cream in the middle to make a stuffed cookie.

Out went the tea, in came the milk.The makers described it as a chocolate sandwich cookie, but now it simply goes by “Oreo.” Utter the word and an immediate image springs to mind: that of uniform factory-stamped crisp chocolate wafers and their impossibly white, so-sweet-it-will-make-your-fillings-ache frosting layer. The name “Oreo” has become ubiquitous. After all, what other single cookie has spawned personality tests (how you eat an Oreo reveals hidden truths!) and a parody song (thank you Weird Al).

My daughter opts out of baking this week in favor of snuggling next to her brother’s friend. Baking alone moves at a faster clip as I follow a Baking Illustrated recipe for chocolate icebox cookies. It results in a log of dough to refrigerate then cut into perfectly-round thin slices for baking. Its exactness is entirely different from all of the drop or cookie cutter types of cookies I’ve made. While they bake, I assemble the filling from two simple ingredients—melted white chocolate and sour cream.

With real Oreos, neither part is much good without the other. A crunchy chocolate biscuit? Eh. Overly-sweet unctuous cream filling? Blech. But together, ah, heaven—they are what weight gain is made of. My cookies turn out to be good diet cookies in that, for me, they don’t create a craving for more. They are too thick, the filling too runny. But even Nabisco suffered their own share of failed Oreo iterations: lemon meringue, strawberry milkshake, banana split, and triple stuf cookies (apparently supersize-happy Americans find three layers of sugary filling to be too much). Despite my own dislike of the cookies I made, the boys gobble them up happily.

And I get to witness an eight-year-old boy sleepover firsthand. It goes something like this: ordered-in pizza eaten while standing and talking (mouths full), chandelier-shaking wrestling matches, video games played side-by-side (the new parallel play) on various i-products, and movies involving spies or superheroes or both.

Though sleep and slumber are implicit in the event titles, there is little of it. As any parent knows, there is zero correlation between later bedtimes for young kids and later rising times. My son and his pal go to sleep at midnight and commence talking loudly at 5:30 in the morning, as if they’d never had a break in conversation. By afternoon, both the boys and us parents are grouchy and over-tired.

Sleepovers exist in a small window in childhood. We parents open it when the time is right and our children close it themselves when they become too old to enjoy the novelties of choosing their own movies, eating junk food, and staying up as late as they can. They'll find they don't need that single night of freedom; they'll be plenty free and heading out on their own soon enough. 

For now, I’ll revel in the sleep deprivation and prepare for the toilet-papering to come.

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