Lessons in Cookie Making

I had a terrible week that started right after my hand mixer decided to die on me, so last Friday when I got home from work, I decided that the only cure would be to make some cookies and spend the night decorating them. I had just bought some heart cutters from Dollarama and wanted to put them to good use. I had even found a decent sounding recipe for cookie icing that didn’t involve the needing of a mixer.

My only problem was that when I opened the fridge, I realized I was out of butter. I still had on hand a box of margarine squares sitting in the back, but I was in the middle of making supper and there was no way that I wanted to deal with rush hour, despite having two grocery stores just down the street from us. So I sucked it up and used margarine instead.

I’m sure this is probably not going to come as a shock to anyone, but the bare cookies had a little “off” taste to them. They were still edible and Trevor raved about them all night, but to me, they didn’t have the same rich, savory flavour. The icing recipe isn’t even worth posting, as although it looked nice, it was a pain to pipe and it wasn’t the same royal cookie icing taste that I’m used to. It also didn’t harden properly after 48 hours of sitting out, so some of the tops got squashed during packaging.

So lessons learned:

1). NOTHING beats butter in cookies. Seriously, the next time butter comes on sale, I’m stocking up so I don’t find myself in the same situation.

2). Double tie your piping bags. I wish I had taken a picture of the mess I had created, but lets just say that one of my bags exploded black icing all over my table and some of the cookies. I blame the consistency of the icing. And the icing recipe. And my shaky hands.

3). Make cookies with lots of time to spare. It was well after midnight when I finally put the piping bag down and I had been up since 6am, so I was a little cross-eyed.

Still though, it was nice to practice my piping. And if you recognize the handwriting of the word “love” that’s because it’s from a wonderful video tutorial from Sweet Adventures of Sugarbelle. (Although she has much better writing).

And if it makes you feel better, I made cookies again tonight WITH butter and they turned out perfect. I’m also going to attempt to make royal icing by hand. But that is for next week…