Epic Fail

**No pictures in this post, my apologies. I was too amped up to remember to snap some photographs.

Tonight on my to-do list for Cutter's birthday party this weekend was bake sugar cookies.
Simple. Easy.

My mother in-law had given Cutter (read: me) baseball themed cookie cutters for Christmas and I wanted to use them for the party. I made the dough last night and set it in the fridge to chill overnight per my Martha Stewart Cookies recipe. I picked it up tonight and it was a solid rock. Even after 30 minutes of chilling there was no softening; just continued hardening. Ugh. I enlisted the help of my mom and she agreed that the dough was a lost cause. Call it intuition, but I had purchased two tubes of Pillsbury sugar cookie dough while we were at Target today just in case. We wrangled those from the fridge and rolled out the dough. I cut the cookies and we had a great system going.

Our first batch came out of the oven with the parchment paper folded over on top of the cookies (burnt into the cookies in fact) and we realized that we had placed them entirely too close on the sheet. Seriously? You'd think I'd never made sugar cookies before. This was just not my baking night.

After rearranging future cookie sheets and deciding that the finished product resembled nothing remotely close to the cookie cutter itself; we opted for circles that could be passed off as baseballs. Rhythms found, trays passed, cookies baked. They were all cooling on the wire racks and we set to make the royal icing. I had read somewhere that you could substitute cream of tartar for meringue powder and so I made that substitution. The icing was a great consistency and we poured it into two separate bags; one for white and one for red. We mixed the red bag and then set to piping two of the baseballs with the white icing and then let them set for 5 minutes. During that downtime I reached over and accidentally pushed some icing out of the bag. I grabbed it with my finger and instinctively licked it off of my finger.

Hmmm.

Different. Weird. Disgusting.

The icing tasted so metallic. I quipped to my mom, "I feel like I was just sucking on a copper pipe." I cannot describe it any other way. It was horrific. And at that point, I had had it.

I took all of the icing and threw it away (after I made both my dad and husband taste it to be sure it wasn't just me, they agreed - just like sucking on a copper pipe).

I love to bake and this makes it sound like I am awful. To save my fragile ego I must tell you that I am a wonderful baker and have made many, many delicious treats over the years -- cheesecakes, pies, cookies, cakes, you name it! I promise you I have culinary skill. Today just wasn't my day.

My cookies remain un-iced and look decidely nothing like a baseball cap, bat, and glove.
Happy Birthday to you, Cutter. Happy Birthday.