The Shortbread Experience

A Photographic Journey

Warning to Nick W: If you were hoping to be surprised by your birthday cookies, I suggest you skip this post until said cookies have been devoured at the event of your choosing. Instead, I offer you this.

First things first. Turn on some Keith Partridge.

You're gonna need some butter.

At this point realize that when you looked at the recipe and went shopping for ingredients, you had forgotten that the recipe needs to be doubled to get a decent amount of cookies. Hence, you will have to use regular, non-measured butter, and don't bother to measure it, just scoop it out and chuck it in the bowl.

Get out the corn starch! Especially since you bought an extra box of it yesterday, thinking you threw out the last box in The Great Above The Sink Cupboard Clean Out of Two Weeks Ago.

Then remember again that you may not have bought enough ingredients. Get the hippo magnet off the fridge. Note the Keith Partridge picture as mentioned in the previous post!

Now put him on the measuring cup and measure out the icing sugar.

Discover that there's enough, thankfully, cause no way were you going to Superstore today. Now add the corn starch.

Now add a pile of flour.

Now, it's time to mash everything up with your hands, which have hopefully been furiously scrubbed. In this case, yes.

At this point, realize that the amount of butter you dumped in was too much. The mixture felt and looked like mashed potatoes.

Then start to feel like this:

Think about how sometimes the Dreyf is great, like in Close Encounters, Jaws, and The Goodbye Girl. But what's the deal with Mr. Holland's Opus and Krippendorf's Tribe? Stop cancelling yourself out Dreyf! Then look him up on imdb.com to see if you spelled Krippendorf right, and realize that since he has been in Stand By Me, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, What About Bob?, was adorable in his three minutes in Postcards From The Edge and was in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, which you have yet to see because the library doesn't have it but you have heard big things about, that maybe you were being too hard on the guy. I mean, he was truly grand in The Goodbye Girl. It's almost as if Dustin Hoffman didn't exist, he'd be the Dustin Hoffman. And maybe that's hard to deal with. And you know what? You're no prize either! Cut him some slack! Accept that you were being a jerk and move on with your day.

By now, the dough is all mixed up and ready to go. Get out your cookie cutter collection.

Start sorting. Eliminate Christmas ones. Wonder where the cat one went. Settle on the dog, bunny, triceratops, pig, and elephant.

Also bust out those dollar store Halloween cookie cutters that you know are iffy to deal with.

It's definitely time to turn on the fan. And showcase Snorlax.

Dig out the rolling pin, and a bear dressed as a hippo.

Spread flour all over the counter and take an unfocused picture of it.

Now plop down the dough and roll it flat. Insert cookie cutters!

Remove cookie cutters.

Try to pick up the elephant cookie.

Get frustrated that his trunk keeps breaking off and refuse to use the elephant cookie cutter anymore.

Eat some cookie dough. Be reminded of Christmas time.

After some animal cookies are done, it's time to move on to the Halloween cookies. And like you suspected, they were iffy and the cookie dough got trapped inside!

Look how that cookie cutter has ruined the layout!

But look how fabulous the remaining cookies look!

Start feeling proud of yourself!

Look how badass your cookies are!

Now remember that some of these cookies are meant to end up with icing on them, and what would be the point of making badass looking cookies if you ice over them? So get out your Colonel Sanders glass and start making regular round cookies.

Which will turn into Pac-Man cookies. And one bunny. That's starting to remind you of Watership Down.

Start baking the cookies, which takes a surprisingly long time. Let long-armed monkey watch over them until they are all baked.

Badass.

Now, bust out the icing and stick it in an icing dealie like this:

Go to town on those mothers!

Find two random chocolate chips that escaped The Chocolate Chip Cookie Project of yesterday and use them for the eyes of dinos.

Place the cookies in your freezer on top of a box of Pot of Gold that you got in January for $2.50 and are saving for some kind of occasion that warrants them, so that the icing can harden and you can put them in a tin without smashing the icing all together.

Run out of room and cram them wherever you can.

Eat a few of the cookies, pack the rest in a tin and set them aside until Nick W. decides what he wants to do for his birthday and the cookies can be exploded upon friends!

Be glad that there was just not enough room for the last Pac-Man cookie.

Take a bow.