Baking queen! Mindy Kaling decided to pass some time while in quarantine amid the coronavirus pandemic by baking some chocolate chip cookies.
The Office alum, 40, took to her Instagram on Sunday, March 29, to show off her baking process and even gave a special shoutout to her former Mindy Project costar and friend, Ike Barinholtz. “Well our bakeries might all be shutting down, so what is a cookie lover to do but to bake her own cookies,” the actress began. “So that’s what I’m going to do today.”
Kaling went on to explain that she was going to bake her “favorite” type of chocolate chip cookie, which is one that is a “dense little puck,” not flat and crunchy.
The Late Night star then assembled all of her ingredients, some of which were harder to come by than others. “What I know about baking in the time of coronavirus is that it’s very hard to get ingredients,” she quipped. While sugar, nuts and chocolate chips were easy to locate, Kaling had a tough time tracking down some flour.
That’s where Barinholtz, 43, came in. “Flour is very hard [to find],” Kaling explained. “This flour is in this bag hermetically sealed because my friend Ike Barinholtz gave it to me. I swapped it for half a lasagna that I left on his doorstep.”
The Massachusetts native added: “These are the times, you have to barter for ingredients. Thank you, Ike!”
Before she even began baking, Kaling made sure to wash her hands thoroughly with “not sexy” antibacterial soap. She then explained that she was cutting the recipe in half (because she didn’t want 36 cookies all to herself) and got started.
Aside from the aforementioned standard ingredients, the Champions creator revealed her “controversial” choice to always includes a dash of cinnamon in her chocolate chip treats. “People who hate it can never taste it when it’s in there, so I shouldn’t have told you,” she joked. Kaling also added a handful of toasted pecans and Nestlé chocolate chips to the batter.
“It’s going to be real hard to bake these and not just eat this,” she said as she stirred the dough. “This smells so good.”
Once the cookies were finished, the Dartmouth grad tasted one and deemed it “really good.”
“It’s not as sweet as your typical chocolate chip cookie,” she concluded. “But [it’s] bursting with flavor. I like.”
Though bartering for ingredients (like Kaling did in order to get some flour) might seem strange, it’s actually become quite common as the coronavirus crisis continues, even among the celebrity set. On March 26, for example, Chrissy Teigen arranged a trade with total strangers and gave them half of one of her loaves of banana bread in exchange for three heads of romaine lettuce. The trade, which took place with social distancing in mind, involved a toy car and tape measure, so no one had to touch anything and everyone remained at least six feet apart at all times.
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