Sugar Cookies and Failure

I'd like to begin this post by addressing the elephant in the room....It's been over a month since I last blogged and I am deeply apologetic to my loyal readers for leaving you hanging.  In my defence, I've spent the last few months in a relationship that was rapidly spiraling into dysfunction.  I was spending a lot of my time and energy dreading the moments we would be together.  Then, when I couldn't avoid "quality time" any longer, I would be antsy and impatient until it was over.  Finally, I admitted that my needs were just not being met and moved on.  I broke up with my old laptop that made blogging and photo editing a SLOW chore and upgraded to my new love, a super fast, super sleek Dell with a giant HD screen!  I can't wait to really put it through it's paces with some hard core picture editing, but in the mean time, here's a little something that I've been dying to share with the blog world.

When my friend decided to have an Independence Day potluck, I knew immediately that I would be bringing chips and Pioneer Woman's Restaurant Style Salsa, but I also wanted to bring a cute 4th of July themed dessert.  I  browsed my go-to favorite blogs until I saw these beauties on inchmark.

Photo courtesy of inchmark, where Brooke shows off her cupcake

(and pretty much all-around) adorableness.

I don't often make sugar cookies because they do not taste good enough to justify the amount of work involved.  I mean, seriously, rolling out, cutting, icing, flooding....Who has that kind of time or patience?  I am a WOMAN in training, not a SAINT in training!  I found a recipe (on Pioneer Woman's blog of course, do you think she should be concerned about me as a potential stalker?) that seemed easy-ish because it made use of an egg-yolk glaze pre-baking for color, instead of icing.  I felt much more up to painting on a glaze than trying to flood a cookie with icing.  I'm not really sure how to flood, but it seems fairly hard and impressive to me.  PW warned that they weren't "Martha worthy" cookies, but after seeing her pictures, I thought they'd be okay for my purposes.

Christmas cookie photo courtesy of Pioneer Woman.

The process began well.  The dough was so good that I could have happily eaten the whole batch raw.  Of course, I couldn't because I was working toward the noble goal of making impressively adorable cupcakes to make my friends think I'm super cool and womanly.  The rolling out process was alright, although I let the dough get a little warm and it was sort of mushy. 

 Inserting the skewers provided the first hurdle.  I thought I'd be really smart and soak my skewers in water before baking them into the cookies.  You have to soak them so they don't get black on the BBQ, right?  I thought it would be the same thing in the oven.  Wet skewers + mushy dough =  slimy, gross, mushy dough. 

Then I tried to apply the egg yolk wash with a tiny water color brush, but it would not stick to the cookie dough.  So, I brought out my big silicone pastry brush.  Still no luck.  Finally, I decided to be really smart and efficient and pour the egg wash on top of the cookies.  This coated the cookies but definitely created a gross, eggy crust around the edges of the cookies.

I tried trimming the crusty egg wash, but it was pretty happy clinging to the cookies.

If you don't look too close, they turned out alright, but they definitely did not help convince my friends that I am adorable or womanly.  I thought some simple, white powdered sugar icing might improve the situation, but I added too much milk and it was too runny to add much detail.  Also, my skewers were much too long, so the stars flew high above their cupcake bases. 

Given that the end product was tasty and enjoyed by all, it might be a touch on the dramatic side to call this adventure a failure, but I am a bit of a perfectionist, especially when it comes to cupcakes, so I'm going to go ahead and say it was a sugar cookie failure. You can keep your sugar cookies, I'll stick to baking the good old chocolate chip variety!