Just your standard sugar cookie, right?

For today's adventure, I attempted basically a standard sugar cookie with a twist.  During my labor day weekend trip home, I picked up (i.e. borrowed from my mom) some supplies and cookbooks.  I brought with me the Death By Chocolate cookbook which, if you're familiar with it, you know that just reading the recipes clogs your arteries.  I also brought the "Favorite Brand Name Bake Sale Cookbook".  I've had this cookbook for many years and have tried a couple of the recipes in it and they were yummy so I figured it'd be a good starting point.  Plus there are pictures. I like the pictures.

I found a recipe for "Watermelon Slices" which doesn't tell you anything about the cookies at all.  However, in the picture the cookies look like watermelon slices so that was enough incentive for me.  After reading the recipe, I realized that these cookies are sugar cookies but preciously decorated with food coloring and sprinkles.  The one problem with this cookbook is that it uses brand name products.  As in, the recipe called for "Duncan Hines Golden Sugar Cookie Mix".  Using a cookie mix feels like cheating to me.  So I hunted through the book for a sugar cookie recipe and found...nothing.  So I looked in the cookbook I used last time and found...nothing. Then I thought, "Aha! I own the Joy of Cooking like every good beginner chef!"  In Joy of Cooking I found a recipe for "Roll Cookies" which seemed right to me because the recipe looked like it would yield a sugar cookie and I needed to roll the cookies.  Score.

Now at this point you must be thinking "any idiot can make sugar cookies so what will make this post interesting?"  Merely my ineptitude in the kitchen, dear readers. First of all, combining two recipes is somewhat confusing, particularly when one recipe yields a different number of cookies than the other. That was not insurmountable though. I was feeling pretty confident. I combined my butter and sugar, followed by my flour, eggs, etc etc.  However, the dough wasn't mixing very well at all. It was all clumpy and crumbly and not good.  I decided that the problem was the fact that I was using a hand mixer and a Pyrex bowl instead of a serious mixer.  Fortunately for me, my mom gave me her old Mixmaster mixer (since she has the far superior KitchenAid mixer) and I dragged that out.  The thing looks ancient but it was functional.  Its age shows though.  It doesn't mix at a steady pace.  Instead it sort of sputters and goes fast and then slow in no discernible pattern.  At one point, it actually sputtered and died for a few seconds.  Santa, I would like a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas. K thanx.

Back to the point, the dough was still crumbly and poorly combined even after switching to the better mixer.  Hmm.  A Google search informed me that other people have had this problem with the Joy of Cooking recipe.  Way to go, Rombauer and Becker. Google also told me that I could add a bit of water or milk to the dough to get it to the right consistency.  Question: how do I know it's the right consistency? Google answer: it feels like Play-Doh. Ok, back on track! I've played with Play-Doh lots of times! Adding a bit of water didn't really do the trick but after a splash of milk, I got the dough to where it needed to be.  Then I had to make some of the dough green and the rest of it red.  Here is a picture of my red dough and my *awesome* mixer for your entertainment:

Then I had to roll the red dough into a 12 inch roll with one side flattened. Easy enough except I didn't exactly have a ruler and anyone who knows me knows that my sense of distance is severely skewed. But hey, rulers are for suckers! Being a nerd, I know that a standard sheet of paper is 8.5x11 so I eyeballed it based on that. Baking isn't an exact science, right? Then I had to roll the green dough into a 12x4 inch rectangle.  Again eyeballing it (and thanking my mom for giving me a rolling pin) I got that done easily.  Now here we have a discrepancy in the recipes.  JoC says that the dough should chill for 3-4 hours.  The watermelon slices recipe says to chill for15 minutes.  I decided to chill for the time it took for me to go to the weekly stat dept colloquium and come back.

After returning from colloquium where I pimped out my cookie dough truffles (more on that in a bit) I had to assemble the doughs to look like watermelon slices which was pretty straightforward.  Then I added some chocolate sprinkles to the slices to look like watermelon seeds and voila! Bake and eat. The cookies look completely precious but I'm not too wild about the sugar cookie recipe. The cookies are a little bland so the small hits of chocolate sprinkles are welcome.  Next time I need a sugar cookie recipe I'll try the "Rich Roll Cookie" I think. That said, the cookies look cute enough that I would make these again sometime.  Here are a couple pictures:

I also used the excess dough at the ends of the roll to make this cookie:

Precious, right?  Anyway, now we come to the feature I like to call "Critical Reception" where I look at how people enjoyed the previous post's dessert. 

Critical Reception:

After realizing I would never eat that many cookie dough truffles in my life (seriously, I can eat maybe two a day as a maximum), I took a container of them to colloquium to share with the stat dept.  After about half an hour, all but two of the truffles were gone. The most common reaction was bugged out eyes and "You made these?!?"  My favorite part of all of this was my advisor eating at least five of the truffles.  And when I say at least five, I mean that I only saw him eat five.  I consider this a great success and will continue bribing members of the stat dept with baked goods.