This journey begins with your friendly neighborhood baker wandering into a Barnes and Noble in search of a book. As soon as I walked in, BAM! Staring me in the face on the new books display was the Nerdy Nummies Cookbook. I picked it up immediately and, with no hesitation at all, purchased it. Inside, it is filled with some awesome baking projects with nerdy aspects ranging from fandoms to science to technology to things that are just downright adorable. For example: I never knew that I needed to make geode cupcakes until I read this book. But now I NEED to make geode cupcakes. Geode cupcakes aside, there was one recipe that I couldn't stop thinking about and have been aching to bake ever since I bought the book. That's where the Smart Cookies come in.
The problem is that these cookies are at least a two day process. You need one day to make the glasses for the cookies and then the second day to actually make and decorate the cookies. I thought about it for ages. I printed the glasses template (more on that in a bit). I made sure I had all the ingredients at the ready. But I kept putting it off and putting it off. I'm not sure what it was about this week but maybe it's because I was feeling fidgety after watching almost two straight weeks of Olympics or maybe the 1-2-3 USA sweep of the 100m hurdles inspired me but this was the week that I was tackling these cookies.
Let the games begin! (Get it??? Because the Olympic games are on right now...)
Here I run into my first issue with the Nerdy Nummies cookbook. There's no guidance on how many cookies the recipe makes. So, did I need to make 10 pairs of glasses? 20? 100? I have no idea. I decided to gauge it based on how much icing I had and how bored and/or frustrated I got with my terrible piping. But first I had to make my royal icing. Royal icing is just egg white, vanilla, and powdered sugar. Sounds easy, right? Don't you know by now that when it sounds easy, it's not? First I had to separate five eggs to get the whites. But I had the rather unique problem this time of the eggs cracking vertically. This happened for three out of the five eggs and I have no idea why. It is awfully hard to use my normal egg separation method when the eggs are cracking on the wrong axis. Basically I ended up with both my hands covered in egg and needing to fish an egg yolk out of my bowl of egg whites at least once.
Once that harrowing experience was over, I mixed the egg whites and vanilla and was instructed to add 4 cups of powdered sugar "a few tablespoons at a time." Ha. You must be kidding. That would take forever. I added the sugar 1/2 cup at a time but there was no way I was going to stand there for an hour making icing. Then I had to color it black. I had my handy dandy new food dye with its full coloring guide so I dropped in a few drops of black and, hey, why is it a blueish purple color? Hmm. Added a bit more black dye and now it's a grayish color. Hmm. At this point, I went to my coloring guide and apparently to achieve a deep black, I needed to add SEVENTY drops of black food coloring! I did not quite expect that. At this point, I was just indiscriminately squirting food dye into the icing. Eventually, the icing turned black. (By the way, I wish I had taken a video of my first mixing of the dye because it was so cool watching the white icing streak with black and then get fully incorporated. Next time, I promise I'll take a video because it is hypnotizing.)
So now I have black icing but it is way too thin. It would definitely run right out of the piping bag. So began the process of adding more sugar and then adding more food dye to keep the same color. This went on for about 20 minutes and another 1-2 cups of powdered sugar. Oh, and did I mention that it's already about 10 pm at this point? Finally, I had usable icing. I put it in a pastry bag fitted with a #2 tip as directed...just kidding, you know there's no way I actually have a #2 tip. I'm pretty sure I've run into this problem in the past but haven't rectified it yet. The smallest tip I have is a #6. That may make the piping a bit interesting.
I had previously printed the template from the reference materials for the cookbook but for some reason, the glasses in the template looked way smaller than they should be. I compared them to the templates at the back of the book and, sure enough, they were different sizes! Now why would they do that? Is it that difficult to have consistency of size when we're talking about a pdf or a jpeg? So weird. I decided to do some smaller ones and some larger ones so that I had flexibility depending on how big my cookies turned out. I put a piece of wax paper over the template, secured it with the super scientific method of plopping a handy box of benadryl on the corner (because it was there for some reason) and got to piping. And believe it or not, it was super easy! The icing was completely cooperative and I would've liked the finesse of a smaller piping tip but they came out really well! Things got a bit tricky once I started making the bigger template because I had to balance the wax paper on the book and slide it around to pipe more than one but it was still reasonable enough. Eventually I just started doing them freehand because the shapes were so easy. See for yourself:
Not too shabby! Remember how I said that I was going to gauge how many glasses to make based on my amount of icing? Yeah, after piping all of these, I had enough icing left to fill a 4 cup Pyrex container. Apparently it'll stay for a week in the fridge so I will take any and all suggestions for what I should do with that icing in the next week! (No, I'm really serious, I have no idea what to do with it and I don't want it to go to waste!)
Anywho, I let these dry overnight and the next day, after an energetic Zumba class, I could bake and assemble. I was even joined by my Christmas baking partner-in-crime for some extra fun! The cookies themselves are just Nestle Toll House but without the chocolate chips so I made those without incident. We took a wild guess on how big the cookies should be and made perfect little (ok, big) circles with the cookie scoop. The cookbook suggested 7 minutes for the cooktime but there was no way that was correct. We added another two minutes and voila! Beautiful cookies. Now the tricky part. After letting them cool on the pan for exactly one minute (yes, we set the timer), we had to remove the cookies to a wire rack and place six chocolate chips on the cookies in specific places to leave enough room for the glasses. With two of us, we managed to get this done but we really had to work fast so I'm glad I had help.
While the cookies were baking though, I had to make some pink royal icing. I wasn't about to make the same mistake as the previous day though and make enough to ice an entire cake with though. So I took just one egg white, a splash of vanilla, and enough powdered sugar to get it to the right consistency. To get a pale pink color, I was supposed to add one drop of pink food dye. The problem was, that one drop is meant to color about four cups of icing and I was working with less than one cup of icing. So it came out a bit more hot pink but whatever, it was still cute. Also, since my mixer was filled with cookie dough, I was doing this by hand. It was frustrating and took way more powdered sugar than I would have expected. By the end, it was still a little thin but we only needed it to pipe rosy cheeks on our smart cookies so we just went with it.
As a side note: can anyone explain the science of royal icing to me? Why does it harden over time? It's not like you're heating it or cooling it or doing anything to it so why does it change? Is it magic? I truly don't know.
Hang in there, we're at the last step! We just have to put it all together! For this purpose, I actually went out and bought #1 and #2 piping tips because this was going to be delicate work. We had to attach the glasses with a dot of black royal icing in the center of the back of the glasses first. This didn't work and we had to put dots on the corners instead to make them stick. From the second we attached the first pair of glasses, we spontaneously "Awwwww!"-ed with how cute they were. After attaching all of the glasses, we just had to pipe on eyes, a smile, and pink rosy cheeks. I kid you not, we could not stop audibly squealing at how adorable and perfectly these were turning out. We're talking sneezing panda AWWWWWWs. SO. CUTE. And they looked exactly like the picture!
Ok, maybe they're not all perfect but they're so cute! I should also point out, these cookies are large enough that the whole batch of dough only made 20 cookies. So, I have a lot of extra glasses. Any ideas on what I can do with those glasses? Seriously, I'll take any ideas...
Next time: a truly spectacular birthday dessert for my sister!
A Disney Moment: Zootopia
OMG, I'm finally done! This is the last Disney movie!!! I don't even want to remind you how long ago this project was started. But here we are at long last with Zootopia which I guess ranks a 2/5 in this group because that's what's left but this whole ranking system is shot to hell at this point. That said, I really did enjoy it.
I loved the world-building aspect that has been so consistent in this grouping of movies. As scenes were flashing by, I just kept wishing I could slow it down so I could see all the details of what were happening in the background. I would've liked even just a bit more time to soak it all in. The story was fun, the protagonists were fun, the sloth stuff was solidly funny (even though I had seen it in the previews). I appreciated the fact that the movie surprised me a bit. I thought the middle bit where they catch the bad guy and they have the triumphant press conference was going to be the end of it and then it took a turn for the heavy-handed anti-racism, anti-xenophobia, whatever messaging it went for. I criticize it for its heavy-handedness a bit but overall the story really worked for me.
I find it quite serendipitous that I'd be writing about Zootopia where calling the protagonist "cute"is an insult and I think I've used the word "cute" about 18 times to describe these cookies in this blog post alone.
Next time: a final recap of the journey and the selection of the best Disney film of all time!
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