full grown woman

Fail.

Sometimes I get it into my head that I like baking. Even though pretty much every attempt that I make at baking fails, the nostalgia of baking with my mom and grandma takes over and I fool myself into thinking that I can bake and that it will be a stress free and effortless endeavor and that I will produce delicious and beautiful treats and my family will ooh and ahh and greedily gobble them up while praising my mad baking skills.

So, such a time happened a couple of weeks ago. A mother from school asked me if I would take pictures at Grandparent’s Day and I heard myself saying, “sure I would love to!!” and then, horror of all horrors, “do you need baked goods this year too?” and then, “I would love to provide two dozen cookies!!!”

Since that time I browsed through a few magazines which are filled with baked delights for the holidays, and set my mind on some browned butter iced sugar cookies. A very ambitious recipe because the cookies are rolled out, cut, baked AND iced. But, it’s as if I have some sort of brain short that doesn’t allow me to remember I can’t bake. And so, it never occurred to me that this might be challenging. All I could think about was how beautiful my handcrafted cookies would be and the little whispered comments from other moms at how it must be nice to be able to stay at home and turn out such wonderful delights as my cookies.

So, I told Lily that I was going to bake cookies. She loves to say COOOOOKIEEEEE often and here was the look on her face when I announced the glorious event:

And this was her reaction when I told her it was going to be awhile before she could eat any:

So, the first step is to brown the butter to a deep golden brown. After it is browned you let it cool in the mixing bowl.

It has the most amazing aroma. Nutty and rich. Once it has cooled a bit, you mix in sugar and vanilla:

and then three egg yolks and the dry ingredients.

And then disaster. I didn’t take any pictures of the dough because I was too busy panicking. It was crumbly and sandy in texture. The directions are telling me to gently knead the dough. Uh, WHAT?!?! Gentle isn’t going to do it. I try my best to get the dough to stick together. I wrestle it and desperately try to make it resemble a smooth dough that one could actually use a cookie cutter on with the rolling pin.

I managed, with many words of ill repute muttered under my breath, to get 9 cookies out of a lump of sandy dough that was supposed to make 32.

I dumped the rest of the gritty mess into the trash and hoped that the cookies that made it to the cookie sheet would at least be worth the trouble.

Guess not.

Sigh. I will be going to the store tomorrow to pay for two dozen cookies and then hanging my head in defeat.

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