Oh Cookie, why do you confound me so?

Cookies, oh how I love them. Eating them? No problem, well maybe too much of a problem. I have to ignore that they are within my vicinity, so to not over indulge. Baking? That is another story entirely.  I have good days, but mostly bad ones.

My husband drives me nuts, he can bake cookies with his eyes closed and they come out perfect. My cookie baking experiences are hit and miss.  Let's take the other day for example.  I decided to bake up some cookies for Miss J (my youngest) to take to dance class to celebrate her birthday. I had planned on cupcakes, but it probably would have helped if I had gone grocery shopping to get the ingredients.   I had the ingredients, barely, for cookies.  She wanted to do chocolate sugar cookies (oy vey) and cut them into shapes with sprinkles (well, duh, HAVE to have sprinkles).  So off to the interwebz for a recipe! I found one, but of course it called for butter and while I had butter, it was frozen solid. Not so good for cookies needing to be baked with in a couple of hours.  Substitutions! Yeah, well, therein lies my mistake.  I pulled out the shortening. Now I know full well that there is more moisture in butter and when you substitute shortening for it, there needs to be an added liquid of some kind to make up for it. Did I think of this when I was in the process? Briefly and only when I realized the sandy mess that was in my mixer was not going to make a decent cookie, let alone roll out to cut into shapes.  

So I added a little water and the dough came together, thankfully, but I was pretty sure it wouldn't roll out.  I chilled it anyway (as the recipe called for) but decided that as a back up I'd make my favorite peanut butter cookies too. Those, at least, came out the way they were supposed to.  

As the first batch of peanut butter cookies were baking I pulled out the chocolate cookie dough. No way would it roll out.

 So instead I rolled them into balls, thinking they would spread and flatten out a bit, heh, no.

About half way through the cooking time I squished them down in the middle with the back side of a spoon, then they looked like a cookie! lol!

All in all, Miss J had cookies to take with her. The chocolate ones were decent, not overly sweet but a little on the hard side.  We have plenty left over and they are being eaten, so that's good. I did find a different recipe for chocolate sugar cookies and it calls for more butter than the original recipe I chose, so it may have not been completely me.  May, being the operative word here.  Miss J wants snowflake cookies for her Olaf birthday party this weekend. Hopefully that will be more successful.  

We shall see

Have a beautiful day!

Mrs. Bissinger