C is for Cookie

Way back in November, I was reading a graphic design website when I came upon an interesting article. It was about an Etsy seller who makes custom cookie-cutters of people’s faces. Or their dog. Or your logo, whatever, you just send them a photo, and using some design skills and 3D printing, they can make a cookie-cutter of your face. I immediately thought of my wife Amy, who loves to bake and cook. What an awesome Christmas gift this would be: what if I made a bunch of cookies of her face, as well as giving her the cookie-cutter itself?  I was guaranteed to win Christmas. I mean, look at this photo from the Copypastry Etsy page:

 

 

This was a guaranteed hit!  I found a great picture of Amy from our trip – in it she has a great smile, plus she’s looking right at the camera, and her features are well contrasted. I bet she’d tell you she looks all greasy, and the truth is she probably is a little sweaty. The photo was taken in Delhi, India, in about a thousand-degree heat, at of all places, a McDonald’s. That’s Amy eating a Maharaja Chicken Sandwich (honest to God, that’s what it’s called – they also serve a Chicken Maharaja Mac – no beef in India, you know). But her slight glisten wasn’t going to show up in the negative space of a cookie-cutter.

 

 

Using Photoshop, I isolated Amy from the background (and the Maharajah Chicken Sandwich), and went online and bought the cookie-cutter. This was going to be a great Christmas gift. I patiently awaited the cookie-cutter’s arrival, and it came just after Thanksgiving, luckily at a time when Amy wasn’t around to blow the surprise. After several weeks of giddy anticipation, here’s what finally showed up on our doorstep:

 

 

I picked the color pink, by the way, knowing that’s her favorite color. It was just one more layer in my sneaky Christmas-winning strategy. I was all set to move forward with the plan, but then something started happening. Remember I was telling you how Amy loves to bake and cook?  Well, as Thanksgiving got closer, she really amped up her game. She was baking things all the time, and “test-cooking” stuff for the holidays. She does this – she’ll find a recipe, and then she’ll “test cook” or “test bake” it to make sure she’s got it right. No wonder I can’t lose any weight, it’s like ‘Chopped’ over here during the holidays, and the mystery ingredient is guilt.

 

Anyway, with all this baking and cooking, I was summoned from the living room into the kitchen:

 

“You know what you can get me for Christmas?”

“No.”

“A crock pot.”

“A crock pot?”

“Yeah, I want to try slow-cooking.”

“Okay. Crock pot: check.”

 

A few days later I heard cursing in the kitchen, and then we had the following exchange, yelled from room-to-room:

“YOU KNOW WHAT YOU CAN GET ME FOR CHRISTMAS?”

“NO IDEA.”

“A FOOD SCALE.”

“FOOD SCALE: DULY NOTED.”

 

Then a few days after that, we had a similar room-to-room exchange:

“You know what else you can get me for Christmas?”

(murmured) “The love of family and world peace?”

“What?”

“Nothing, what do you want for Christmas?”

“A nutmeg grater.”

“A WHAT?!”

“A nutmeg grater.”

“A nutmeg grater?”

 

This actually exists. I know this because I was shown a photo of one online. And apparently not only do you grate the nutmeg with the device, there’s also a little trapdoor area where you store the nutmeg…um…”nut”…to be grated. It’s fascinating what you learn.

 

So now I was in a bind. I had received clear direction from Amy about what she wanted for Christmas, which was to weigh, grate, and slow-cook several pounds of nutmeg.  And I didn’t let her down; she would eventually get her crock-pot and food scale for Christmas, although she discovered that she already had a nutmeg grater hidden somewhere in the warren of our kitchen cabinets, sparing me the embarrassment of that conversation at the local kitchen supply store.

 

“Hi, where can I find a nutmeg grater?”

“What kind do you need?”

“There’s more than one kind?”

“Yes, there’s a grinder-style, there’s one that’s like a little cheese grater…”

“Does it have a little trap door where you can store the, um,…nut?”

“It’s a seed, technically.”

“How about this: do you have a large Japanese kitchen knife that I can commit hari-kiri with?”

 

I also realized we were traveling for the holidays, so trying to pull off any kind of cookie-baking surprise at my sister’s was going to be really tough. And I imagined it would’ve been terribly difficult for Amy to peer into the backseat of our Subaru and NOT notice three-dozen cookies in her likeness smiling back at her. So I decided the cookie-cutter and cookies would best be saved for Valentine’s Day, which would be even better, because what’s more romantic than eating your own face?

 

But here’s the catch – it’s like the Christmas situation all over again, because we’re going to be overseas for Valentine’s Day! I thought it would be unreasonable, and downright unlikely, to try and sneak several dozen sugar cookies into my carry-on bag for a transatlantic flight. Though perhaps if my baking skills were good enough, Amy could use the cookies as her travel ID while I was being detained in customs for smuggling food. Nope, this was going to have to be an early Valentine’s Day – I’d have to give her the gifts before we left. Which brings us to this past week…

 

This wasn’t the first time I made Amy cookies for Valentine’s Day. Several years ago I used one of my mother’s old Christmas cookie recipes and made Amy these flower cookies:

 

 

It’s just simple sugar cookie dough, painted with an egg yolk/food coloring mix. I did an okay job, not the greatest, and it surprised Amy, but the most important thing I took from it is that I’m not a baker. Cooking is an art, but baking is a science, and while I can cook, I am NOT a scientist. Hell, I once got a D in a quarter of high school chemistry (thanks, Mrs. Darweesh!).  Why I thought I could bake is beyond me. Just look happened:

 

 

And while painting cookie flowers is easy enough, how was I going to do painting cookie portraits? You know who painted flowers? Van Gogh, that’s who. Then he switched to painting portraits, and then look what happened to that poor nut-job.  But undeterred by my mistakes of the past, and the ghosts of Dutch impressionists, I moved forward with this year’s Valentine’s Day masterplan.

 

Amy’s been going to work early lately, so on Tuesday, I got up just after she left, pulled out all the flour and butter and eggs and stuff, and got to making a batch of sugar cookie dough.

 

 

It only took about a half-hour, so by 8:30 the dough was chilling for the next 24 hours in the garage beer fridge (where it would go undetected), and I was in the shower, mentally prepping for the next day’s big show.

 

Wednesday morning, right after Amy left for work, I was up and ready to get started. Amy has our kitchen stock-piled with an armory of baking contraptions (including a nutmeg grater); it’s like she hijacked a Williams-Sonoma truck. I pulled out all the essential tools for battle – the flour, the rolling pin, baking sheets, cooling racks, the food coloring, and, of course, the fateful cookie-cutter. I got out some eggs and went to work making the “paint,” and then I went into the garage and got the dough, which looked pretty damn good, for an amateur.

 

 

Then I went to work.

 

The Copypastry customized cookie-cutter is a great little novelty gift, but I discovered some of its limitations. If you want to get all the features of the face into your cookie, your dough has to be a bit thicker. And if your dough is a bit thicker, it doesn’t come out of the cutter so easily. Not to mention I’m not so great at rolling out cookies in the first place, so everything was uneven. My first batch was definitely going to be a “test bake.”

 

 

With that first batch, I tried some different things with the colored eggwash. I knew I was going to color the hair brown. Then I was hoping to highlight things with green eyes, and red lips, and possibly paint on eyebrows to see how that worked – I tried it different ways to see what worked best. Well…you be the judge:

 

 

Oh man, these things were demented! No wonder Van Gogh cut his ear off. I mean, take a look at a few of these:

 

 

 

 

Okay, this was bad. And they looked nothing like Amy! I decided to adjust my second batch in order to make these cookies in any way resemble my wife. I’d learned a few lessons:

 

1) If you put on too much lip, it’ll look like something from Ringling Brothers.

2) Little green dots help define the eyes, but too much and she’ll look stone-cold cross-eyed and crazy.

3) Do NOT paint on eyebrows, EVER!

4) If the dough is too thick, the face will look as if she’s been mainlining ice cream.

5) If the dough is too thin, the face will look blotchy and sunburned.

 

It was time for Batch Two. With what I learned from the first batch, I took notes when painting the second batch, and also tried to make sure the dough wasn’t too thick. But the results this time were even more hit-or-miss…

 

 

I couldn’t win.  Sure, things were looking better overall, but all I wanted was to get a few cookies that looked even remotely like my wife.  With the dough (and my patience) starting to run low, I had just enough for a small third and final batch. I made every effort to make this one work. I stopped painting on lips entirely, I was sparing with the green eyes, and I only used well-defined cookie-cuts. And lo and behold, I think it’s the closest I came to perfecting it. The only problem was that I was running out of brown eggwash, and I wasn’t going to whip up a whole new batch for just a half-dozen cookies. Thus, in this final batch, one Amy was given green hair, and a few others given no hair color at all. But, by God, they were close.

 

 

And that’s how the morning ended, with about three dozen cookies, four of which kind-of looked like my wife.   I put them all in a nice Ziploc container, with the worst rejects on the bottom (Sorry, Jesus), and worked my way upward to the ones that looked like the slightest semblance of my wife, i.e. something with a face.  And then I realized I never actually tried one. You know – how did it taste? I grabbed one of the lesser looking ones and ate it.

 

It was not good.  I mean, alright – it wasn’t bad – but it wasn’t that good, either. It was just bland. Maybe not enough sugar, or not enough vanilla? Maybe they were too thick, or I used too much flour rolling them out? All that work, and even if the cookies didn’t entirely look like Amy, you would’ve hoped they would at least taste as sweet as she is (it’s Valentine’s Day, give me that one).  Chalk another one up to failed chemistry (sorry, Mrs. Darweesh).

 

 

Next came the cleanup. I’d made a mess of the whole place. The countertop was littered with flour, the floor was a mess… I had to get the kitchen cleaned up and get ready for work.  I was wiping down countertops and vacuuming and doing dishes; I had to have all trace of cookie baking hidden before I could settle in for work.  And I was finding flour everywhere; in the refrigerator, on the fridge handle, behind the sink, on the drawer pulls; it looked like Pablo Escobar had thrown a party for John Belushi in our kitchen.

 

 

But that wasn’t the worst of it. Later in the day, when I came back from lunch, the house smelled LIKE COOKIES. You know how they say realtors bake cookies to make a house smell good? Well, our house smelled very good. And for the first time in my life, this was the problem, as opposed to it stinking like something considerably different, more bodily, and far more unpleasant.  I couldn’t have Amy coming home and being like, “wow, this place smells of delicious cookie smell!” Here’s where it got crazy. I actually lit a few matches, and then sprayed a bunch of Lysol type stuff, and then I opened the windows for a while. Yes, in February, I opened the windows for twenty minutes to get rid of cookie smell. In Maine. But the coup de grace was burning a piece of toast late in the afternoon. I figured, what could mask the smell of baking better than the smell of burnt baking? And it worked. She came home Wednesday and said, “ooh, someone burnt some toast,” suspecting nothing more than poor toaster management on my part.

Friday was the big day.  When Amy was at work, I took out the cookies (which I’d hidden in an upstairs bedroom), and wrapped everything up with a bow – the cookies, the cutter, and a card.  Then I put them on the bed, so when she came home and went in our bedroom to change, she’d find them there.  I figured that was a bit more charming than them sitting on the kitchen counter next to the iPod charger, the local pennysaver, and the keys to my truck (which is a chick-magnet, but nonetheless).

Amy got home and went into the bedroom, completely surprised.  I’ll let the pictures do the talking here.

By the way, when I made that last batch, I had a little nugget of dough leftover, not enough for another cookie, but enough to roll out and bake the remnants.