Christmas Sugar Cookies

I am not a baker. I enjoy the experiment in the kitchen. I call myself a cook. I can cook. But knowing that I am not a baker I have decided to try and get better at it. I am not a baker because it requires reading directions, following them, using measuring spoons and cups, and paying attention to it while it bakes. I can not tell you how hard this is for me. I get distracted and forget to turn the timer on, or I can't find my measuring cups (thanks to Aidan), or I lose all ability to read a recipe correctly. Trying to double a recipe can be disasterous. Remember I never passed my math class, those fractions are killer! So I am a cook who has been trying to be a baker this holiday season. I only know of two mishaps. With one and sugar cookies I misread the directions. It asked for 1 cup of butter not one stick (very dry and crumbly), and the second had to do with zucchini bread and how many eggs...3 eggs per batch which gives me two loaves of bread. I tripled the batch to make six loaves of bread and so that means I needed 12 eggs right...wrong! 9 eggs... I had to go and by more eggs after that snafu. I didn't even think about pulling out three yolks and making scrambled eggs, I panicked and threw them all away. See I need lots of practice.

One of my nemesis' is Sugar Cookies. The Damn things hate me. To make matters worse most people think that sugar cookies with no shape aren't very good so I have had to work on how to use my cookie cutters. I did my research. I love Alton Brown on the Food Network, Good Eats is so helpful for my questioning everything mentality. But being my baking enemy I decided to do some this year. I made the dough and let it chill for three days (recipe calls for 3 hours but I have had issues with that in the past). So I got it good and chilled. Alton said to use powdered sugar instead of flour when rolling out the dough, I will only enhance the flavor and not make the cookies dry. I began the process. I managed to roll out the dough and cut out about 6 cookies. I was successful in my endeavor. Then our roommate Keira Jo came upstairs and she finished rolling them out. She is amazing! Seriously. I was meticuosly using the cookie cutters (I am pretty sure that 20 minutes for 6 cookies is ridiculous), she was speedy and efficient. Wonderful Keira! Then the baking process. I usually get very bored baking cookies. Every 10 minutes you check, rotate and start over...boring. But I did it, I survived. I used two cookie sheets at a time.

Then we let them cool for one day, 24 hours. I am sure that the men in this house considered it some kind of torture. Then the decorating process began.

I mixed my colors, I loaded my decorating containers and I prepped the preparation table. I was ready to begin. What a tedious process! Maybe if I was talented in the painting department I would have enjoyed it more. Toward the end I didn't decorate nearly as well. After a while Aidan caught on to what I was doing, so did Brian. My boys, my thieves happily ate the broken cookies, the bad frosting jobs and even licked the table where I dropped a frosted cookie (thanks Aidan). I survived boys and girls. And I can now say I did it, and I can also say I won't be decorating sugar cookies very often. TEDIOUS!

Station prepped and ready to go.
Yellow, blue, red and green frosting ready to go.

Plate of "boring" cookies ready to be decorated.

Me trying my hardest to be creative and
domesticated...think Martha Stewart/Sandra Lee.

I haven't even started and you can see the stress in my face.

The bests that my creative side could do.
Some snowmen didn't have faces.
Some gingerbread people were cyclops'.
Some candy canes were barely stripped.

My purple turned yucky black...
All the snowmen look like mini mobsters.