NORTHFIELD, Minn. — As midnight approached on a Monday in late March, the new oven in the Carleton College cookie house was showing some strain. It was running about 20 degrees too cool, a bit of intel that each successive cook had passed along since early afternoon. A baker had mistimed some of her butter cookies. Another engaged in an experiment she referred to as “Choose Your Own Adventure Scones,” including a strawberry-cardamom escapade that literally fell flat. Seraphina Shutt worked her pie dough as two fellow students rattled off a detailed recap of a recent “From,” a promlike party put on by the school’s six Ultimate Frisbee teams. She tried to tune it all out as her crust refused to come together. “Your pie can smell fear,” she said. Carleton’s cookie house is not a frat house (Carleton doesn’t have any), a dorm, a dining hall or a student union. But it is a place where anyone from the campus, at nearly any hour, will find a pantry stocked with the ingredients for making chocolate-chip cookies.…