The recipe says these chocolate acorns are made with Nutter Butter cookies. They’re really made with AI. | Dessertpro
By Brenda Goodman | CNN
It started with the cutest little desserts: chocolate acorns with nut-covered caps that popped up in my search for Thanksgiving cookies on Pinterest, a site I visit for inspiration and some step-by-step instructions. There were also chocolate-dipped strawberries that you could turn into little turkeys using pretzel sticks, with marshmallow pieces for the drumsticks, but the acorns looked easier.
“Who wouldn’t love these things?” I thought.
The recipe said you could whip up a batch in 45 minutes. I splurged and bought my favorite Lindt chocolate bars to make them.
It ended at 1 a.m., after about five hours of effort – including an emergency run to the grocery store for a missing ingredient – with parchment-covered baking sheets spread across my kitchen, holding misshapen globs of chocolate-dunked peanut butter sandwich cookies that didn’t come close to resembling acorns. Despite my many attempts at adjusting the temperature of the chocolate and MacGyvering the cookies — I cut them, stacked them and stuck them together with chocolate — they just could not match the acorns in the photo.
I’m usually pretty good at these things (pie crust being a frustrating exception). I’m an experienced baker, and this should have been an easy project, more assembly than baking. I wasn’t going for gourmet; I needed a lot of treats for a church event and was short on time.
I finally had to admit that no matter how many times I reread the recipe and attempted to follow the instructions, it wasn’t going to work. I was stumped.
Then it dawned on me: Could this recipe have been generated by AI? Had I been had?
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