All week, my daughters wanted to make sugar cookies, the
kind you roll out and decorate. As far as I am concerned, decorated holiday
sugar cookies are the Walmart of the cookie world. They don’t taste good, and
if you aren’t Martha Stewart, they don’t look all that good either. They are
really more for kids, who are not yet in possession of a sophisticated palette
and are naturally drawn to bright colors and fun shapes. They are my least
favorite cookie to make or to eat. We
only make them once a year if that, so for a few hours, I can suck it up and make my
babies happy.
After spending a good fifty bucks on cookie cutters and
decorating stuff and rolls of cookie dough, we got down to business. I decided
to buy dough instead of making it because sugar cookies suck and I don’t care
and it’s easier. I also had to buy some new cookie cutters because I got mad at my old ones taking up too much room in my drawer and tossed them in a fit of rage. And all the toppings, well, who knows how old those are. Does colored sugar go bad? I didn't want to find out. Back home, I got out the cookie trays, the parchment paper, the flour and
the rolling pin. I preheated the ovens, and called the girls over to get
started.
When I was little, I too loved to make sugar cookies. My
mother never made a cookie in her life, but my grandmother would bake them with
my sisters and me. She had an assortment of cookie cutters, a diamond, a heart,
a bell, and for some strange reason, a camel. We would use colored sugar and
red hots and silver nonpareil balls which looking back probably used mercury to
give them their silver hue and shouldn’t have been eaten. We covered the
dough in all sorts of nasty color combinations, and she smiled sweetly and let
us do what we wanted. I don’t remember her ever really eating any of the
cookies we thought were so special, even though the germs no doubt baked out of
the finished product.
Sugar cookies were never high on my priority list as an
adult, again because they suck, but also because they make such a colossal
mess. Also, they remind me of play-doh, one of my most hated children’s toys.
Play-doh smells funny and leaves tiny little pills of colored dough all over
any surface in which it comes in contact. I spent many a day about ten years
ago picking up tiny colored balls and vowing to throw away all of that
non-toxic mess, only to give in the next time the girls asked on a rainy day if they could
play with the play-doh.
While it’s easy clean up sugar cookie dough, it isn’t all
that easy to clean up rainbow sprinkles and colored sugar and chocolate
jimmies, which resemble hamster turds to the untrained eye. For years, I have
made sure we had plenty of other cookies around the holidays so that no one
noticed that we forgot to make decorated sugar cookies. It didn’t work this
year.
Now that my girls are older, baking sugar cookies was more fun because they added their own quirky touches. One of them
meticulously decorated a snowflake cookie with individual sprinkles, while the
other one insisted we used cat shaped cookie cutters so we could make kitties,
which she then embellished with candy assholes. Let me tell you, Santa wants nothing more than a
crisp cat shaped cookie with a balloon knot.
Also, one of the girls found my husband’s Star Wars cookie
cutters, which meant in addition to beautiful snowflakes and cat asses, we also
had an assortment of Yodas and Boba Fetts and Darth Vaders, all tricked out in red
and green. Yum yum!
The other big hit was the gingerbread boy, which my daughters fought to use. each time they cut one out, it was disfigured in some way, missing a limb here or there, whether to shark
attack or birth defect, no one knew. My teen found it enormously amusing to line the torn
edges where a cookie limb should be in red frosting, as if fresh from the
battle field or zombie apocalypse.
So why the no shirts? Well, we had just come back from their
piano recital and we didn’t want to get our clothes dirty. The kitchen is downstairs,
the changes of clothing upstairs, and in between was a whole lot of laziness. It
does get a little toasty near the double ovens, and when you are making
asterisks on your cat cookies, any sense of decorum has already
been lost. Where to go from there but shirtless?
Just a mom and her two
girls, all in bras, licking fingertips and eating scraps of dough, fighting
over who has to sweep the floor, and making memories.
