So Hairy’s bday is today. I have a few, fun presents for him, but I also wanted to try baking something he would like. He is a big fan of red-velvet-anything. Red velvet is not my fave, so I wouldn’t know a good one from a bad one ….. but I do know this: my cookies ended up looking like alien cow patties.
Sorry about taking photos with the flash, but this was at 7 in the morning so there’s not a lot of natural night!
Yesterday, I was rushing to shoot photos and send samples to Michaels, and then I had a 2 hour time window to sneaky-bake before we headed down to Manda’s birthday dinner. I used this recipe for red velvet cookies from Joy the Baker (which is actually a Rachel Ray recipe) and this recipe for cream cheese frosting also from Joy the Baker. I was surprised that the amount of food coloring called for in the cookie recipe equaled a whole little squeezie-tube of food coloring. So. Much. Food. Coloring. But what I really liked about the recipe is that it’s supposed to be for 10 cookies, which is not a humongous amount of cookies to have to get rid of at the end of the day.
I am pretty sure I made my cookies too big by trying to use a 1/4-cup measuring cup as a scoop. Then I started using my hands, and, well, I wish I had three hands at the time, cuz I would have loved to have taken a picture of my hands covered in dark blue sludge.
So I figured if I made my cookies too gigantic, that they should stay in the oven longer, but this was a bad move, as my cookies ended up with an odd crispy crust on the bottom, with the tops of the cookies remaining fluffy and cake-like. Oops.
I have never made frosting before, so that was pretty fun. It actually tasted pretty good, even though I didn’t have time to sift the powdered sugar. After hiding the frosting in the fridge overnight with a sign on it that said, “Top Secret. Eat and Die,” I feel like I can taste the grainy-ness of the sugar. Boo. I hid the cookies in the craft room under a poncho. While wrapping Manda’s presents, I opened every window in the house to try to get rid of any cookie-baking smells or suspicious heat from the oven. It was actually pretty lucky that we had dinner with Manda, because Hairy had not much reason to poke around in the fridge, where there was a carton of BUTTERMILK <– very suspicious. At 7am, I frosted them and set them out by the coffee maker, only to realize, how truly hideous my cookies ended up.
Here is my friend Angel’s take on the matter:
AHAHA! I love her.
Well, now you can see why I don’t cook. *salute*
