Christmas Cookie Fail

I love my mom's cut-out cookies. I remember helping to cut the shapes out as she rolled and re-rolled the dough when we were kids. She chilled the dough before rolling it out, so sometimes dad would sneak a big spoonful of it, followed by three children with spoons. I have made similar versions to this cut-out cookie recipe in the past with decent results. I had no reason to believe that this year's batch would be any different. The only problem was that I did not have my mom's original recipe. Now, most cut-out cookie recipes are very similar, so I just decided to go online and get the measurements for the ingredients correct. I went to a recipe near the top of the search results and thought it looked fine. You know how things often look fine on paper and then taste like crap later on? Similar story here.

I'm mixing the ingredients and the amount of flour seems pretty extreme. I keep mixing. The dough looks to be about the right consistency, but I have about 2 cups of flour yet to add. By the time all the flour was mixed in I had a bowl full of dough pebbles that wouldn't form into a ball no matter how hard I tried. What the heck. So, Aaron came to the rescue and added some milk and some sugar to get it pliable again. He double-checked the recipe I'd been using and said, "Umm, honey, this recipe didn't get very good reviews..." Indeed it had not. The first review minced no words and announced that "This recipe sucks." Way to go me on not checking the reviews first. We put the dough in the fridge and went out to run some errands.

Liam and I bought cookie cutters and busted out the dough when we got home. It looked relatively normal, but no person with actual taste buds should have ever tried a bite of it. I did. It was not good. I couldn't waste the dough, so I added some more sugar and decided to just go for it. We cut out a few dozen cookies and I put the first batch in the oven. Liam dragged his stool over to check the progress and we waited with bated breath.

Well, the resulting chunks of hard tack tasted just as bland as the dough had. So, we were stuck with about 3 dozen Christmas-shaped cardboard cookies in need of frosting. I thought I'd have fun frosting them at least and mixed up some fun colors and got started. I had wanted to frost the reindeer cookies brown, so we mixed up a combination of colors and got...gray. This entire venture is not going well.

We ended up with cookies that looked...pretty much as gross as they tasted:

Expect some gray Christmas Santas in the mail soon! Merry Christmas!