2006-12-18

In which I take this holiday spirit thing a bit too far...

I made Christmas cookies this weekend. I thought it would be a good idea. But again I was confronted with the obvious truth that I am so not Betty Crocker.

First I made spritz cookies, which were my mother-in-law�s thing. Although I ended up with a bunch of little green Christmas trees, as per the plan, I also ended up wiping up green from my kitchen for two days. That wasn�t fun.

Then I made giant ginger cookies. The directions warn you not to overbake them by removing them from the oven when the bottoms are �lightly� brown. Here�s the thing: the dough itself is brown. How the hell do you tell if dough that is already brown has �browned?� The recipe doesn�t answer that question. So I think maybe I overbaked them, despite the warning. They aren�t bad, they just aren�t as soft as one might expect.

Finally, I made sugar cookie cutouts.* Both rolling the dough to a uniform 1/8� thickness and getting the cutouts to maintain their shape during the transfer to the cookie sheet take some kind of talent, which I do not possess. So I finally just gave up and started cutting the dough into abstract shapes with a spatula. This was way easier. Then I had the following exchange with my husband, who was sitting across the room and not participating (unless you call "mocking" participating, and I don�t):

Him: What are you doing with the spatula?

Me: I�m cutting out abstract cookie shapes.

Him: You can�t do that. You have to use the cookie cutters.

Me: No, I don�t, hence the term �abstract.� Think outside the box, dear.

Him (exasperated): You can�t make Christmas cutouts by thinking outside the box. Cutouts require that you stay in the box � BY DEFINITION!

I don�t know about you, but I wouldn�t have expected that kind of rigid thinking from someone in marketing. I�m just saying.

*I�m using �made� in the loosest sense of the word. Perhaps �attempted to make� would have been a better choice of words.