You know when you get out of bed, find yourself in the kitchen and start cooking before your brain’s fully woken up? Half-sleepwalking, half still dreaming, I started making cookies at 9 a.m. before anyone else was awake, and barely thought about what I was doing until my boyfriend shuffled downstairs (okay, fine, bounded down like a puppy ten minutes after me), turned on the football game (okay, fine, Manchester vs. West Ham), started drinking milk out of the carton (okay, fine, eating kimchi out of the container), and said, “is something burning?” (okay, fine, it was.)

We recently bought a brand new shiny nonstick baking sheet to replace the apartment’s incredibly old one, which was black and peeling and had clearly been around the chocolate-chip-cookie block more than a few times. ‘Caramelized’ would be a nice way of putting it. But I’ve still been trying to use it, lined with parchment paper or foil, and this morning I stuck one batch of cookies on the new one and a second batch on the old one in the bottom of the oven (read: the actual bottom of the oven. This oven has no second rack.), thinking I’d just watch them vigilantly and pull them out in time.

A smoky kitchen later, I had one pan of blackened char and a second filled with a gorgeous, golden-encrusted mass of one single cookie. I couldn’t figure out what I’d done wrong until I realized that I’d started out cutting my batter recipe in half, but I’d sleepily forgotten to halve the sugar and egg - my proportions were all off. So, I did the only thing there was to do: sliced up the giant cookie, spread chocolate frosting between the layers, and made a sort of shamelessly Americanized baklava, which we immediately dubbed cookie lasagna.

After the cookie lasagna batch, I fixed up the batter - just to assure you that I can make a halfway decent cookie if I feel like it:

For the record, the cookie lasagna recipe included chopped up Reese’s peanut butter eggs, a 3 Musketeers bar, and some Lindor truffles.