The Sugar Cookie Insanity Part 2

Fast forward from the flour disaster to a few days later. My sweet husband...who by the way got a good laugh at my expense when he was told about the dough issues I had...asked when I was going to cook those cookies. (This man LOVES frosted sugar cookies, so when I only make them once a year or so, he's very anxious to get them cooked and frosted.)

I set aside another day to cook ALL the dough. I just wanted it over with and I don't want to look at dough again after this. So, I got all ready and thought it would just be easier to slice off the dough and cook it all round. Well...NO, that would make me Mrs. Scrooge or something, if all the cookies didn't resemble some significant Christmas shape.

Yes, I rolled out and used cookie cutters on all twenty-five million tons of dough. Right when I got started I had told my mom about this debacle with the dough and she was laughing so hard. She said I should blog about this. (Certainly so she can show it to her friends and everyone could get a good laugh at my expense...oh well. Bring on the laughter).

Anyway, at the beginning of my baking, I decided that I would make my own day by counting exactly how many cookies I would make. That way I could be the winner of the dough, the woman who made a million sugar cookies...like, "remember that Christmas when Mom made a ton of sugar cookies?" Yep, I was going to chronicle this.

So, I kept a count of every single cookie that was cut and decorated. See my lovely tick mark sheet? I taped it to the wall and kept track of every pan that came out of that hot oven.

Grand total?

THREE-HUNDRED EIGHTY-ONE!!!!

And that is with about 3 pounds of dough that is still in my freezer. Yay me.

 

Now, you might be asking...how does one make frosting for over 300 cookies?

 

ONE stinkin batch at a time. I wasn't about to be in a cloud of powdered sugar. Nope. We were going to do this in shifts.

 

But do it we did. We frosted, delivered, ate, and enjoyed 381 sugar cookies. Jacob's class got some, Abby's class got some, Jackson's class got some, David's work got some, the sisters at church I visit got some, the families from church that we visit got some. The kids took them in their lunches, and David had all he could want.

 

 Notice the pizza box on the table? On baking day, there was no other cooking, preparing or messing with food in this kitchen. The Dominoes man was called in for reinforcements. Ha ha.

 Cutting cookies and eating them at the same time...skills.

 

 

I knew we were in the thick of sugar cookie decorating season when I was trying to figure out why my 10 month old baby boy had little colored dots all over his feet. Yep, he was stepping on all the food-colored sprinkles that were ALL over the floor, and he was left with a rainbow of colored dots on his little sweet feet.

 

We are done. A few sugar cookies remain, un-frosted. They are the remainder of the insanity, but there will be NO MORE frosting. So there they sit, kind of haunting me; a reminder of the many reasons why my kids will have killer memories of the holidays...and why I should never, ever do this again.

 

Happy holiday baking! I'll be in the bacon isle. 

The Sugar Cookie Insanity

One of our favorite Christmas-time traditions is making, decorating and pigging out on homemade sugar cookies. This year we decided to give a bunch away, too. So, I set aside a whole day to knock out a bunch of cookies.

The recipe I have calls for 7 cups of flour. It seems like a lot, but when you're making sugar cookies, the thicker they are the better...that way they "need" more frosting. So, this one recipe doesn't go very far. I usually double it for our family. Yes, we eat lots of them...it is Christmas after all.

This time I decided to triple the recipe, which would mean 21 cups of flour. I figured I would save some time by making all my measurements in the biggest capacity I could. For example: if I needed 3 teaspoons of something, I could just use 1 tablespoon instead (because that's the RIGHT conversion).

So, I go online to my trusty Google search engine and type in the conversions I needed and wrote down everything in my recipe as converted to triple it's size.

Well...I should've paid more attention to Jacob's homework the week before from Science about mass/density and volume. My conversion for flour was not really for flour. I got a conversion for water or liquid. Because flour doesn't weigh as much as water. DUH.

So, what I though the conversion said was that 21 cups of flour equals 11 pounds...but it meant WATER equals that.

YES, okay...I added 11 pounds of flour to my recipe...which, for those of you who know how to do math, is 42..yep...FORTY-TWO cups of stinkin flour.

Before I caught my mistake, I got all the ingredients added, which also include 12 eggs, 6 cups of sugar, 6 cups of shortening and 3 cups of milk...and some other things. I still had not figured out my mistake, until I could barely get my hands out of the flour mixture because it was so stiff.

I was probably all shades of purple and red by the time I figured out what I had done. Really? I'm that out of it? I DOUBLED THE TRIPLE RECIPE. 

Well, I was going to beat that dough. Not literally as it smacking it around, but as in WINNING. I was going to save those cookies and make all of them. Take that google search and 11 pounds of flour. I'll show you.

But that means I had to add all the other ingredients, AGAIN. I was out of shortening and eggs. Cleaned up my mess, ran to the store, in the snow, and got my stuff. Back to the dough. Added 12 more eggs, more milk, shortening, sugar and the other stuff.

If at this point you are wondering what stinking large bowl I would have to own in order to pull this off...well, I do have a pretty big bowl, but not big enough for this to be very easy. I was going at snail's pace and working all this in very slowly to avoid total explosion. Well, I did pretty good, but I was wearing some by the end and of course, it was all over the floor.

After adding all the necessary ingredients for a 6x recipe, the dough still wasn't right...too sticky now. Really...will it ever end? So...yes...I'm going to say it...I added MORE flour. Not a lot more, I was getting leery of flour by now. But just enough to make it the right consistency.

And when it was all over, I had the perfect dough. It was about 6pm and the kids were wondering if we were going to eat sugar cookies for dinner. So, I stopped. Put all the dough in bags and into the freezer. Someday in the future I would look at that dough again and maybe cook it.

But, I did it. I saved the dough. I beat the flour. And next time...in ONE whole year from now when I attempt this again, I will measure the flour, ONE CUP AT A TIME.