From Scratch

My daughters and I started a new holiday tradition: baking cookies in our underwear.   Why, you might be wondering? The short answer to your question is that I don’t have three aprons. Let’s go for the long answer, though, because it’s more fun that way.

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. 

One Woman Ranting

I knew when I didn’t wake up early to pee today that something wasn’t quite right. My sister usually chalks up days like these to Mercury being in retrograde, but I don’t know what that means, nor would I believe in it if I did. I do believe in Murphy’s Law and bad luck and when it rains it pours. Except sometimes it doesn’t pour, it just gets misty and starts and stops and is generally irritating. That’s how today was.

My massage I had scheduled for today was cancelled. I know, I know, first world problems. But still, it was my massage. The italics are to let you know to read that sentence as a whine. My massage therapist had some bullshit reason like a scheduling issue, and cancelled my appointment with about two hours’ notice. Can you imagine calling off your massage with two hours’ notice? I’m sure you’d have to pay for it anyway, just like you would at the doctor’s office. If Starbucks fucks up your coffee order, they will occasionally give you a card for a free drink. I should get an extra fifteen minutes tacked onto my rescheduled appointment.

Since I had a block of free time, I decided to make a coffee cake from scratch to take to the gym in the morning. One of the fitness instructors has been out for a long time following one of those freak accidents that you hear about on the news: Woman injured as SUV rolls out of driveway is expected to make a full recovery. Well, tomorrow’s her first day back to torturing us at the gym after her ribs knit themselves back together, and what better way to commemorate it than a coffee cake?

So I baked a beautiful cake from scratch with a ribbon of cinnamon, brown sugar, and walnuts through the middle. I set it on the counter to cool for ten minutes before taking it out of the cake pan. I placed the wire rack on top of the cake pan and flipped it. Instead of setting the cake down on top of the rack, I dumped the whole thing on the counter. The cake cracked open like a delicate piñata, spilling its cinnamon walnut layer all over the counter. I picked up the salvageable pieces and put them back in the pan, then swept the rest into a giant crumb pile which then went in the garbage. Then I said some bad words and went upstairs to shower.

 

 

 

During my shower, the doorbell rang. It was UPS! I had five packages waiting on my doorstep, the bounty of my Cyber Monday activities. I opened four of the packages without incident, but the fifth one was a doozy. It was one of those thick plastic bags that doesn’t have any perforation, so you just have to hack at it with scissors hoping to force an opening somewhere. I hacked all right, right through one of the shirts. Merry Christmas, kid! Don’t look at the back of your shirt where I cut an extra hole. What makes it even worse is that I spent literally two hours on that website, the most user unfriendly website on all of Al Gore’s invention, trying to buy a goddamn t-shirt. A one of kind t-shirt, as in cannot be reordered or replaced. I sat down immediately to email the company to complain about their packaging. After I sent it, I checked over the rest of the shirts and realized I ordered the wrong size on a different one, which is for the same person as the shirt that I nicked.  

The best part of the day, stolen from me. My cake, nay, my talent for baking, lay in so many hunks on the counter. My carefully planned and chosen gifts a tattered and missized reminder to check my order before placing it. Is the universe trying to tell me something?

Perhaps it was all coincidence. Perhaps it’s time for me to slow down and take my time. Perhaps I am getting old and less careful. Perhaps I am losing my touch. Or maybe, perhaps today just sucked, and it has nothing to do with me.