Betty Crocker, I'm Not!

I don't bake. Really. I tried to bake peppermint cookies for Christmas a few years ago. They came out so hard and so flat that you could have played poker with them. They were a joke. So I don't really bake that much unless it's fool-proof, like a simple pre-boxed brownie or cake mix.

I love watching the baking shows and I can only wish I had enough talent to make some of the things that I see on Cake Boss or Amazing Wedding Cakes (namely, the things that the Cake Girls make!).

A girl needs to start small, right? So, thanks to I am Baker, I have gotten brave enough to try something she has posted. Now, to a seasoned baker, this might not be anything major. But, don't forget, I don't bake. So attempting this recipe was a big step for me and it only dawned on me half-way through the experience that I really need to share this with all of you.

The recipe is for Coffee Sugar Cookies. I got the bright idea to make a tray of these in the heart cut-outs as shown on the original blog by "I am Baker", decorate them and take them to Claire's school for all of the teachers. Then I thought why not make a double batch, complete with names, for each of my 9 clinical classmates? I got all of the ingredients, a great heart-shaped cookie cutter, and even purchased Wilton meringue powder for the royal icing and a small package of Wilton icing tips.

So, I made the dough. Refrigerated. Rolled it all out. Cut it all out in the heart shapes. This is what they looked like going into the oven:

Pretty cute, right?

And THIS is how they came out of the oven:

I'm not entirely sure what happened, but whenever I try to bake cookies, they NEVER hold their shape while baking! I wanted to cry. I had such a vision of how cute these were going to be and how I'd feel so great for being the one to actually make them. And then this is what I get?!

But, I got yet another bright idea. Since they actually came out bigger than they went in, the heart-shaped cutter still fit on the baked cookies. I let them cool enough that they weren't super soft but not all the way set up and re-cut them. Kind of a pain in the tuckas and a little bit of a crumbly mess, but it worked!!

That was all on Friday. Saturday morning, I got up and dutifully got to work preparing the royal icicng. Got it all mixed up and got my food coloring in it and the pink looked so pretty! Put my Wilton tips in the bag, added the icing, and...

Somehow the tip got drawn back into the bag, making it impossible to reach without splooging out a ton of icing. After fussing with it for a good five minutes, I squeezed the bag hard in anger (therefore losing most of the icing from the bag), forcefully pulled the now-pink gooey tip out, tossed the tip into the sink, and threw the freaking icing away. An innocent bystander said "Why did you throw it all away? You could have just iced the entire cookie instead of a decoration!"

Because that's not the vision I had. The vision I had isn't working but I still don't want to do it any other way!

I had this whole idea about how cute they would look-- the ones for my clinical group, with each person's name on their own cookie in red, with the cookie itself outlined in pink. And the ones for Claire's school drizzled as they were in the I am Baker post.

So what did I do? Loaded my happy self into the car to head to work, leaving an extra 20 minutes early to run to Walmart. I should have just bought the pre-packaged Betty Crocker icing to begin with!

After work Saturday night, I calmly decorated the cookies.

The finished product?

They still look pretty cute, right?

But will I be making them again anytime soon?

Negative!