Cookie Chaos

It recently occurred to me that while I write about eating, potato chips, drinking and cleaning the kitchen, I never write about actual cooking. Clarification... I have written about cooking, but only in regards to: A) that I don't love to do it; B) I don't spend hours pouring over cookbooks and dreaming about the next magical meal I'm going to whip up; C) that my kids are semi-picky eaters in regards to texture, cheesiness, sauciness, and spiciness; and D) Christmas cookies.

For eleven months out of the year, my cookie baking skills consist of a handy plastic package of pre-made cookie dough purchased in the dairy section. In addition to this being due to the fact that I'm almost always too lazy to haul the stand mixer out and I'm too anal to have the bulky space hog sitting on my counter year round, it's also due to the fact that the only reason I ever make cookies is because my kids want them. And even though my kids want them, they do not need to have five dozen cookies sitting in the house because, inevitably, four dozen of them will go uneaten. For me - having softened butter and creamed the butter and mixed the butter with the dry ingredients and then watched this butter mixture morph into something besides a burnt cookie - chucking those stale little suckers into the garbage can makes me, well, despise baking. And it makes me resentful. And who needs to be resentful about baking when, as parents, we have so many other things to be resentful about?

Anyway, each December, something happens to my brain that I'm sure most psychologists would put into the same classification as Bat Shit Insanity. I start hoarding butter and sugar when it's on sale, dig through recipes and clear a day on my calendar so that I can spend several hours standing in my kitchen.

This year, after several muttered (and a few shouted) obscenities, yards of parchment paper and too many sticks of butter to acknowledge without dry heaving, I ended up with approximately 22 dozen cookies. After Thursday, when I bake the sugar and gingerbread, there will be what is commonly known in the baking world as a fuck ton of cookies. But hey, I have some appreciative friends, a satisfied mailman, a perplexed garbage man and some happy children so, ya know, it was worth it. I guess.

Since I, the non-baker, managed to crank out so many circles of fat without even so much as over-browning one bottom or giving anyone food poisoning, I've decided to share some of my cookie baking tips. If you want to incorporate them into your own holiday baking extravaganza, feel free. If you want me to go burn in a fiery hell because I'm not supposed to talk about anything besides drinking and beating children, I completely understand.

HOLIDAY COOKIE BAKING WITH

THE MEAN MOM

IN WICH COCKTAILS ARE CONSUMED

AND NO BURNS ARE SUSTAINED

• Buy and use parchment paper. I buy mine at Costco because you get several football field lengths for not that much money. Use it on every pan, even the ones that claim to be nonstick because then not only will your cookies look better in the end, but you won't have to wash any pans.
• Another bonus of parchment paper: you can just slide the whole paper off of the pan, directly onto the cooling rack. No more trying to wedge a spatula under a too-warm cookie, resulting in a destroyed/deformed cookie.
• For those of you that own Silpat/silicone baking mats, do what I did and STOP USING THEM. They are a pain in the ass to wash, no pan ever created fits them exactly without either wasted space and/or the mat lopping over the edges and did I mention that they're a pain in the ass?
• If you don't have a palm tree in your yard and can't wear shorts year round, the fastest way to cool the cookie sheets between batches is to put them outside.
• I use the insulated cookie sheets, but have also used the edgeless non-insulated kind. It really is a matter of preference and keep in mind that cookies baked on the non-insulated sheets will have browner edges and bottoms. Also, I am convinced that the burn-rate is much higher for the non-insulated.
• This may sound a lot like Martha and for that I apologize, but I never make drop cookies without a spring-lever scoop. It's like a mini ice cream scoop and it makes plopping that lump of dough so much easier. Plus, all your cookies will be the same size and if you're anal like me, you get a little bit neurotic if all your cookies aren't the same size.
• Unless you happen to own 25 cooling racks, cover a giant flat surface with freezer paper, waxy side down. Then, once your cookies have cooled on the parchment paper, move them to the freezer paper to finish setting (especially important when making the always-popular peanut butter/Hershey's Kiss cookies). The waxy surface will prevent any grease/butter/fat from soaking through to the table.
• Don't frost the sugar cookies too soon before Christmas because storing them is a pain in the ass.
• This is common sense, but if you need to chill some dough for three hours, make that dough first and then move it to a different bowl to chill so that your mixer bowl is free to make something else. Otherwise you'll just spend those three hours sitting around, during which you may start cocktailing, which will result in some really interesting cookies and probably a few burns (no, I'm not talking about the cookies). Since I am still staring at a scar from a Thanksgiving mishap, I am very much against charred flesh.
• If you see the peppermint candy cane Hershey's Kisses, buy two bags. They sell out fast. And if you aren't able to find them, then you won't be able to make these:

Candy Cane Kiss Cookies

1/2 c. butter-flavored shortening

1/2 c. butter, softened

1 c. brown sugar

1 c. white sugar

2 eggs

1 1/2 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

1/2 tsp. salt

2 1/2 c. flower, spooned and leveled

1/4 c. + 2 Tbsp. unsweetened cocoa powder

1 - 12 oz. bag dark chocolate chips

a bag of Hershey's Candy Cane Kisses, unwrapped (duh)

Preheat oven to 350

Cream together butter, shortening, brown sugar and white sugar for 1-2 minutes on medium-high speed or until light and fluffy, aka the stuff is stuck together enough that it stops flying out of the mixer bowl. Add the eggs (one at a time) and vanilla. Meanwhile, in a separate bowl, use a whisk to combine the baking powder, baking soda, salt, flour and cocoa powder. Add to the butter/sugar glop and mix until combined. At this point, if you're like me and don't like chocolate, try not to gag. Mix in the chocolate chips.

Refrigerate dough for 30-60 minutes. Make a drink.

Drop the dough by the tablespoonful onto an ungreased baking sheet, aka parchment paper lined cookie sheet. Bake until just set, but centers are still soft, about 9 minutes. Remove from oven without burning yourself and allow to cool for 1-2 minutes. Use a metal spatula to move cookies to cooling rack, or, since you were super smart and used the parchment paper, simply slide the entire piece of paper to the cooling rack and then put the cookie sheet outside to cool. Top each cookie with a candy cane thing.

This is critical, allow to cool completely. Those Kisses take longer than an 82 year old man to harden. After the cookie part seems like you can pick it up without it breaking, you can carefully move it from the cooling rack to the paper covered table, but try not to bump the Kiss. Unless you're like my kid who intentionally bumps it and then says "oops this one is wrecked guess I better just eat it."

Serve the cookies. Make another drink.

And happy holidays.

The Christmas Countdown

I know I'm not alone here (right, Nancy!?) when I say...enough with the countdowns. I'm tired of hearing "Are you done with your Christmas shopping? Did you get your cards out yet? What are your plans for winter break?" and "Only a few more days to get it all done!" Every time I see a festive sweater or hear yet another version of Rudolph or the words "Doorbuster, Santariffic" or "Wrap the Holidays in Fun," it doesn't make me want to go a'caroling or a'wassailing or a'shopping. It does, however, put me in the mood to go a'drinking and a'swearing while I a'watch a little a'football.

The good news is that yes, I am done with the shopping, the wrapping, the mailing and, despite wanting to skip this year, I even sent out Christmas cards. The fake tree is decorated, the Santa gifts are hidden and each kid has a bag of crap that's just waiting to be jammed into their always-too-small stocking. But, sadly, I'm not done. Not even close.

According to my calendar, what I've been told, and what I overheard while eavesdropping on those two women at Target, these are a few of the statistics:

• There is one week left until Christmas.
• Two weeks left until we say adios to 2010.
• Three school days before winter break.
• Or for some kids, zero days until winter break.
• Three trips to the grocery store that need to be made.
• Actually, it's six trips if you count the two different stores because it wouldn't make sense for one store to carry everything that I need.
• Two trips to the liquor store.
• Or, for the insane, zero trips to the liquor store.
• Or, if you're me, five trips.
• $250 of express shipping fees that someone (but not me) needs to spend because a couple out-of-town recipients were "forgotten."
• $0 of shipping fees because I paid attention when I got an email that said "Perfect gift for the mother-in-law" and "FREE SHIPPING!"
• Twenty dozen cookies that will be baked in the next 36 hours.
• Which sounds almost as nauseating as saying "three pounds of butter."
• Seven days left to play the Santa card.
• Eight gifts that "might" be returned to the store before Christmas if someone doesn't change their attitude NOW!
• Two parents that had the nerve to plan a kid's birthday party the week before Christmas.
• One more choir concert to get through.
• One piano recital to get through. And oh how I hope that woman that has a Bump-It permanently implanted in her skull sits in front of me again.
• Two more tennis lessons. Oh, and two tournaments before 2011.
• Four more trips to the junior high, which will bring the number of trips in one week to a grand total of Ee-Lev-En.
• Three bags of ice that I'm planning on purchasing in the next week.
• Four bags if things go well.
• Six bags if things go really well.
• Oh wait, I forgot about New Year's weekend. So then, let's just say a lot of bags of ice.
• Two classes that a kid missed last Friday, but it's okay because it was a planned absence and I was assured that the kid had everything turned in.
• Four things that weren't turned in, completed, accounted for or were just forgotten about.
• Ten minutes that I yelled about those four things.
• Four limbs on a kid that resembled a dried up reptile because, after all, there are only three different things of lotion in the bathroom to choose from so how could I be so unrealistic as to expect the lotion to actually be applied to the scaly skin?
• Really, though, how could I expect him to use lotion? After all, I've only reminded him 472 times.
• Three times within fifteen minutes that I said "You need to get up at 6."
• Which explains why, within one minute, a kid asked "So what time should I get up?"
• Ten minutes that I yelled about that.
• Twelve minutes that I wasted, standing in line at the self-service kiosk at the post office, waiting for the technologically retarded (I know that term isn't politically correct, but I think that in this case she was sort of retarded) woman to figure out how to ship a manila envelope to St. Louis and also purchase one sheet of Forever stamps, all within one transaction. She failed. Miserably. Instead of one transaction, it was actually more like seven. Seriously. The machine would not stop beeping at her.
• Zero inches of snow in the weather forecast for the next two weeks. You hear that, bitch-face Mother Nature? I want ZERO!
• Six scaly spots on Zoe's face that need to heal so that people can stop asking me "What's on her face? What's wrong with your daughter? Does she have the chicken pox?" and I have to repeatedly say: No, she doesn't have a disease. It's because they had Clifford (you know, the big red sweetly retarded {sorry} dog) day at school a few days ago and they used face paint to put these black dots on my kid's face. But unfortunately they used some funky face paint that contained arsenic and lye and cyanide and was probably made in Tanzania and had been recalled in 1983, which left these angry red spots on my daughter's cheeks. No, she doesn't have chicken pox because even though I'm anal and organized, I don't have the power to make sure that chicken-pox-induced red sores appear perfectly symmetrical and in only one highly visible location. And if you think the spots look freaky now, you should have seen her right after I washed the face paint off:

Oh, and yesterday she got a haircut and her bangs are so cute. But they're really short which, for some reason, accentuates the fact that there is also a scaly spot on the end of her nose. Cuz, ya know, Clifford's nose is black.

Now, where is that first bag of ice?

Low-Income (Gingerbread) Housing

I don't know what it is that possesses people this time of year, but suddenly everyone thinks it's a great idea to try to construct a house made of baked goods. I overheard two suit-wearing men at Costco contemplating the purchase of a gingerbread house kit, thinking it would be so much fun to put together and display at the office. A friend of mine on Facebook put a kit together with her kid and instead of creating a memorable moment, it resulted in this status update: "Why can such a nice holiday tradition such as building gingerbread houses go so wrong?? ...grrrr.). I've seen several moms caving in to the pleas of small children, voluntarily putting a kit in their cart, completely oblivious to the torture they're about to put themselves through. I've wanted to intervene and tell all of these people NO! DON'T DO IT! YOU WILL FOREVER HATE THE HOLIDAYS AND THE SMELL OF NUTMEG IF YOU PURCHASE THAT PRODUCT! but then I think, hell - if I suffered through it, then so should they.

(originally posted on December 15, 2009)

I don't bake very often and when I do, I'm a big fan of pre-made cookie dough. I don't have to bring the butter to room temperature, cleanup is minimal and I don't end up with six-dozen cookies in the house. Yet for reasons that I can't explain, Christmas motivates me to actually drag out the stand mixer, soften butter, buy chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk and bake from scratch. I don't make anything very extravagant, but at least it's something that doesn't come in a yellow package with the words "Do not consume raw cookie dough" printed in two different locations. And by the way, if you eat an entire thing of raw cookie dough and end up spending a little extra time in the bathroom with a stomach ache, don't get pissed off at Nestle.

So anyway, back to Christmas. Every year I manage to decorate a fake tree, hang stockings, wind some garland around my railings, drink cocktails and bake some cookies. I never ruin perfectly good booze with eggnog, wear "festive" sweaters, sing Christmas carols in public and, with the exception of 2002, I never make a gingerbread house.

Several years ago, when Charlie was four, he found a gingerbread house kit at Target. Since assembling kits of any type are pretty much my own little slice of hell, I tried to talk him out of it, offering to buy him new Legos or cigarettes instead. Unfortunately, he was completely obsessed with purchasing this nightmare-in-a-box. Yes, I know I could have just said "No" and left the store with the sad child in tow, but for some reason I thought maybe it would actually be fun! After all, the box claimed that it was: "A perfect Christmas craft for the entire family. A real holiday treat."

Turns out, it would have been more fun to spend a couple hours exfoliating my face with a cheese grater. The roof with "shingle-like embossing" was cracked, the frosting sucked, the "sparkling starlight mints and jewel-tone jelly beans" were stuck together, and after seeing that our house wasn't going to be the whimsical palace that he had envisioned, Charlie wanted nothing to do with our gingerbread-flavored Habitat for Humanity masterpiece. I was about to drop the whole kit into the garbage, make a much needed drink and breathe a sigh of relief, but Doug made me put the damn thing together so he could make a video and laugh. So even though I may have built a gingerbread house worthy of condemnation, at least I was able to contribute to his holiday cheer.

Look! The Angel Is Flying!

After devoting last Sunday to baking cookies, I feel like I have definitely filled my quota of "beat butter and sugar until creamy" and "cut butter into flour until it resembles fine crumbs." Honestly, why don't recipes just say "beat the shit out of it" and "mash it until it looks like dirt," because those would be terms I would be able to decipher.

You'd think that after hanging out with my stand mixer for seven hours, I'd be done baking, but unfortunately I still hadn't made any cut-out sugar cookies or gingerbread hoodlums. I tried to convince the kids that maybe we could skip the frosting and sprinkling mayhem this year, but they were excited about spending an evening together spreading royal icing on snowmen and stars. Damn traditions.

I figured I'd just pick up a couple tubs of pre-made sugar cookie dough and be able to put the mixer away for another year, but apparently everyone else had the same idea, because it was out of stock everywhere. What the hell kind of grocery store buyer can't figure out that maybe he should order extra cookie dough during the holidays? A dumb shit buyer, that's who.

I managed to find a decent recipe, cream more butter and sugar, and also made the gingerbread dough on Monday night, mentally preparing myself for a fun morning of rolling out dough, having the dough stick to the table, arranging decapitated snowmen on the cookie sheet, swearing a few times, sweeping up flour from the floor, and making memories. No better way to start out the day than spending a few hours coated in flour.

Imagine my surprise when the dough rolled out just like Martha's, nothing stuck to the rolling pin, and the snowflake actually looked like a snowflake instead of a snowball! Was I actually enjoying making cut-out cookies? Hell has frozen over!

According to the recipe, the trick to making sure that the snowman still looks like a snowman after you bake it (instead of a morbidly obese snowman that looks like he ate six other snowmen) is to chill the cookies on the cookie sheet before it goes into the oven. Since my refrigerator had limited space, I thought: "Hey! It's cold outside! I'll just set the cookie sheet on the deck railing to chill for a few minutes. I'm a genius! Cookie baking is a piece of cake!"

I preheated the oven, and after about ten minutes, I opened the door to discover this sight:

What the hell? Where did my cookies go? Did some asshole walk up on the deck to steal my cookies? I know they looked pretty, and making them can be a real pain in the ass, but is anyone really that desperate? Suddenly, a cold wind hit me in the face and that's when I looked down on the patio:

There, in a crumpled heap, was a sad snowman, an angel, a couple stars, and a few little Christmas trees. The wind had lifted the parchment paper like a kite and sent it flying through the air. I knew things had been going too well.

By the end of the evening, the remainder of the dough had been baked, the frosting was tinted, and since we couldn't find any Christmas music that didn't make us physically ill, 93X was cranked in the background. While we all sang along to Guns N' Roses, the cookies were finally decorated. Doug even participated, and I'll give you one guess to figure out which cookie is his:

The gingerbread man would say "Merry Christmas" if it weren't for the fact that his mouth is full. Of angel head.