Flowers and Hearts

February 22, 2012

When my blog posts are far and few between, it doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned you, my tens of thousands 3 or 4 faithful followers. It only means I’ve been cookie-ing up to my eyeballs with a death grip on my icing bottles. Such as been the case since before Valentines Day. And this leads to my blind spot when it comes to decorating. I always, without exception, under-estimate how long a batch of cookies will take to decorate. It may be true that 3 children is no more effort to raise than 1 child (as both a point of logic and as a simple math equation, I find that line of reasoning bordering on the absurd) but a few dozen cookies is just a wee bit more laborious than one imagines when calculating the steps it will take to do that one single prototype you see in your cookie brain.

Such was the case with this little cookie.

Simple enough.  Just mix the ingredients, roll out the cookies, pop them in the oven, set them out to cool, make the icing, mix the colors, and then pull out the KopyKake projector and start flooding, drying, outlining, and then detail with icing and edible markers. Oh, and then heat seal before slapping a label on the back and calling it done. Not. A. Problem.

At least not when you’re only doing one cookie but when you multiply that number by say…oh…

let’s say, 135 for example, the time and effort it takes to make that one little cookie multiplies to an amount beyond my ability to calculate, and lest anyone here be mistaken, let me clear things up for you. I bake cookies. I do not do math. I barely passed high school algebra and I dropped out of trigonometry on the second day of class which by all accounts was two days later than common sense should have dictated.

So yes, it took me longer than I anticipated to decorate these sweet little morsels of sunshine and goodness.

Over on Facebook I was asked by a few of “my fans” (I love saying that by the way. My fans, my people, my homies) and while I can’t tell you the exact time it took since I was getting a little blurry on minor details such as time, space, and what my name was by the end of the project,  it would probably break down to something like this:

• Day One: Make the icing, divide and color. 4 hours.
• Day Two: Mix, roll, cut out, bake, cool, and bag the cookies. 6 hours.
• Day Three: Fill the icing bottles and flood the cookies. 10 hours.
• Day Four: Outline and fill the scalloped border. Outline the design in black. Add hearts. Fill in flower color. Add green icing to branches. Add black swirl to hearts. Drop head on table and whimper. 18 hours.
• Day Five: Add black dots to border. 1 hour.
• Day Six: Photo shoot. Go over cookies one at a time front and back with soft clean brush to remove any crumbs or icing bits. Individually heat seal and label cookies. Clean all decorating supplies and scrap three layers of corn syrup glaze off everything within a 15 yard radius of decorating station. 6 hours.

Which leads to 45 hours of hands-on cookie decorating and two fingertips on my right hand that are still numb from squeezing icing bottles three weeks later, but to tell you the truth, I think I might have underestimated the actual time.

But don’t get me wrong. I loved making these cookies and am as grateful as can be that I was asked to do them by the good people over at the BlackHawk Museum Guild for their Hearts and Flowers luncheon as well as for the wonderful donation it brought in for the ALS Association. I’m one of the fortunate people in this world who with few exceptions gets to live each day according to the adage, “Do what you love, love what you do.” When it comes to cookie-ing I am and I do. How fortunate and grateful am I?

Posted in Cookie Creations, Cookies