Never again will I look at a beautifully decorated cake or cookie and think, “I can do that!” because I cannot.
I decided to bake some cookies for my friend who is deployed right now. I like making chocolate chip or brownies because they are easy. Because of the heat, mailing chocolate is not the best idea. I decided to make sugar cookies.
At first, I was tempted to buy the pretty ones that I can find at Yummaries bakery here in town. Because I wanted to send a lot of cookies, that was not practical for my purse. So, I bought all the ingredients to make my own.
I haven’t made sugar cookies since I was a kid. As a kid, I never actually made them, just decorated them. How hard could it be?
Here is how hard. You have to wait. Yes, wait. I hate waiting for food unless it’s a roast in the oven or something in the crock-pot. So I followed the directions in my old McCall’s and made the dough and put it in the fridge overnight.
By the next day I was done making cookies and I hadn’t even baked them yet. The instructions say to do one quarter of the dough at a time, leave the rest in the fridge until you are ready. I was able to get through one half the dough. (Yes, the other half is still uncooked in the fridge. Anyone want some uncooked sugar cookie dough?)
Inspiration struck. I can cut them out to look like Jazzy and decorate them and have something else to draw people to my table when I sell books. Eagerly I started forming Jazzy heads with elongated noses and floppy ears. After my tenth Jazzy face cookie I was done. Circles and a couple of G-clefs were all that were created after that.
Fortunately, it only takes 12 minutes or so to cook the dough. You’re supposed to let the cookies cool for a long, long, long time before adding icing. Of course, I gave the cookies a minimal amount of time to cool.
Icing: gooey, messy, stuff to make. I was getting powdered sugar everywhere. Somehow it got on my nose or something because every time I’d tilt my head a cloud of powder wafted to the counter. I followed the recipe and started sifting the sugar. That lasted for one bowl, the white. Everything else was not sifted (so sue me.) I made brown and white for her face. I put the icing in the bag and started piping. This looks so easy when other people do it. I am telling you now, it’s a skill. You have to have the right consistency icing, the right size for the opening and the right amount of pressure. If you look at my cookies you will see I had none of these things.
After decorating my 10 cookies I was out of icing. I must have done something wrong because that was supposed to last the batch.
I made another bowl of icing, separated it for July 4th colors and decorated the remaining cookies as expertly as I could.
All in all, they are kind of cute, they taste great and were made with love. Next time though, I’m buying.