Good Advice

Deciding to bake cookies for yesterday’s Cookie Swap after all, recalling the epic fail earlier in the year when I made cookies for the Cookie/Cocoa Social, which cookies came out burnt, I followed Dkzody’s advice, left as a comment on that January post,  and baked the cookies 10 minutes less than what the recipe called for.

Gingerbread Molasses Cookies came out perfect and were the first to go.

The Baker asked for the recipe, so I shared with her my secret.

The Cookie Swap was not well attended. I blame the timing – the fact there were too many activities lumped together on the same day. First was Pizza Delivery, followed by Bingo. By the time 2:00 rolled around for the Cookie Swap, residents were tired and back in their units.

I skipped pizza delivery, skipped bingo and went down to the Community Room specifically for the swap and to decorate ugly sweater cookies.

It wasn’t the ugly sweater cookies I’d expected, instead we decorated round sugar cookies provided by The Baker.

Had I known, I would have brought a couple ugly sweater cookie sets instead of baking, yet and still I gave the round cookies a shot.

The sugar cookies must have been pretty tasty, because others were eating them up as fast as they got decorations on. One late arrival didn’t bother to decorate. She dumped like a third of a cup of royal icing on one little cookie, ate it like that, then repeated the process several more times.

My sweet tooth seeming now to be a thing of the past, I wasn’t tempted to eat not one cookie. Nor did I bring the ones I decorated back to my unit. I left them on the counter and, as there are folks around here that will eat anything left out, I’m sure someone came in later and enjoyed them with a cup of coffee.

Later in my unit, I began tackling the Starbucks Gingerbread Café.

Last post, I did say I’ve never attempted a gingerbread house of any kind before and, working with a kit where everything was pre-made and provided, I posed the question “how difficult can it be for my inexperienced self?”

Answer is … a picture is worth a thousand words.

It was enormously difficult and, as you can see, I suck at using piping bags. I did, however, excel at innovation because, when my little gingerbread man broke at the waist, I turned him into a walking dead zombie.

The red part at the waist, which is where he broke, is blood and guts pouring out.

Disappointed that my first foray into gingerbread house decorating, came out looking like a child’s project, wanting to prove to myself I could do so much better, I purchased another kit.

It failed completely.

First kit, I ignored directions to decorate first then build. Instead, I built first. That went well until I was called upon to use my non-existent piping skills, and produced the above shaggy dog effect.

Second kit, I followed directions, decorated first then did the build. However, once the decorations were fully dry, they began breaking off during the build stage and the building would not hold, it collapsed.

I tried to save it by scraping off corner icing, removing some of the decorations and building again but, after a second and third collapse, into the trash it went.

Refusing to give up without a fight, I purchased a third and final kit this morning.

So far so better.