The Tale of the Christmas Cookies: Part 1
Julie invited us over to make cookies, and she asked, “Should I get the box mix?”
I commented that speech like that was blasphemous and that inviting people over to make box mix cookies was just retarded. So I called my grandma for her sugar cookie and icing recipes and my dad for our raisin-purée filled cutout cookies (made like ravioli).
She bought the stuff while Matt and I made some dinner to take over. We had to bring vanilla, my food processor, and my rolling pin. We ate food and then I tried my best to recreate the stuff the way it is supposed to turn out. After Julie was finished processing the raisins, I told Matt to mix them in with the sugar and water to stew. He pulled out Gail’s nested whisk, pushed it directly into the sticky mess, and proceeded to get all of the raisin goo stuck inside of all 3 layers of the whisk. I had to dig it out with a knife for a couple of minutes.
While he was cooking the goo down, Julie mixed the sugar cookie dough and we put it in the freezer for a bit. We put a tester on a pan and it came out looking like a huge pancake, which means it was wrong so we added more flour. They were still pancakes but less flat so i added even more, and the other folks started playing with the TV. My last set came out right so i started hammering out the cookies. Julie started mixing the icing but found that she couldn’t do it by hand because it was a mostly butter-based icing, so we used the processor. It came out like paste which means that the deocrations she bought (like colored sugared and sprinkles) didn’t stick unless you pushed them into the icing. She and Matt started cutting out the already cooked cookies and were having a horrible time (because you aren’t supposed to do that, but it was still funny). They then iced them rather strangely, and it looked kinda like they were on drugs when they did it.
Afterwards, I started mixing up the raisin cookie dough; it was wet and it smelled like pool chlorine but it tasted right. I assumed that was residue from the crappy Wegman’s shortening in the tub. I dumped flour on their island tabletop and tried rolling out some of the dough, but it wasn’t firm enough. It just fell to pieces. So I tried again adding more flour and the last trial worked. I had Julie start cutting them out and filling them along with Matt. I cycled the cookies through the oven and did some dishes and then poof! Time elapsed and all of the cookies were done and the dishes were done, too.
We watched videos on Jeff’s fancy home-built Linux PVR. His system sucked so I had to shut down MythTV and use the command line to transfer videos (such as Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory trailer) from Matt’s hard drive to the my hard drive to the PVR drive.
William asked me a physics question about baseball and I answered it horribly. We went home and forgot to take some of the raisin filled cookies but we did take some of the sugar cookies.
This week is going be chock full of even more cookies and holiday cooking cheer. Stayed tuned for more updates.