Once upon a time, my roommate wanted to make her mommy's famous Christmas cookies. Now as she was going to be teaching a lesson on Christmas to a bunch of really little children, she also wanted to bring in yummy decorated cookies for everyone in the class.
She had all of the ingredients for the cookies and even did a test run earlier in the week. However, my favorite part of Christmas cookies was missing.
At home, we decorate our Christmas cookies using this:
Too bad Austria hasn't gotten on that train yet.
Previously she bought what was thought to be colored gel frosting that turned out to be just food coloring under closer inspection.
So my roommate, Mackenzie, was prepared to make homemade frosting instead. We went to the store for a few odds and ends. Before she finished getting her ingredients to make the frosting from scratch however, we found something we thought would make our lives easier.
This:
From the words and the picture on the label we thought, hey, this will do! Vanilla glaze for cakes. Sweet!
Oh how wrong a girl can be!
We came home and we (read: Mackenzie) began baking up a storm of delicious sugar cookies.
The container of icing was in one giant solid block. This should have tipped us off.
So we put it in a pot on the stove to heat it up per instructions because we are ohne Mikrowelle in this establishment. Fairly quickly the frosting/glaze stuff became the right consistency and was divided into three containers: two glass bowls and the original plastic container it came in. I mixed in green, red, and yellow food coloring into the respective bowls and felt we were all set for leisurely cookie decorating fun.
Look, my first decorated cookie of the 2011 Christmas season!
I am so calm and relaxed here. Not for long.
Things were going along nicely until I realized something strange was happening to the red icing. It was re-hardening! But just the red icing...curious.
We panicked and started decorating as fast as we could. Then it started happening to the yellow icing too!
So we said, "Screw it! Let's just use the green and do plain green Christmas trees for all of them."
And a few minutes later the green began to develop a weird consistency as well. Bummer!
"So much for easier," we thought.
So then I started taking the bags I was using to pipe the icing onto the cookies and running them under the SCALDING water from our sink. Which kinda worked.
When that stopped being effective (because I couldn't get the icing hot enough without getting water in the bag or getting burned in the process), I resorted to sticking the two glass bowls of icing directly on the stovetop to reheat it.
At this point we realized something. No matter what we did to reheat the icing, if we didn't work quickly it would happen all over again. Not only that, but the reheated red icing looked like some sort of oily congealed space goop.
So we went Henry Ford on those bad boys and formed an assembly line to knock out making something like 17 cookies in three minutes flat.
Most of these are from before the icing meltdown...I mean, opposite of meltdown. In other words, these are the good ones.
Never would I have imagined I would hear "GO! GO! GO! WE CAN DO THIS!" while decorating cookies.
These are some of the cookies from the mass production lot. Sad, huh?
I guess there is a first for everything.
Lesson learned: Living abroad sometimes requires one to be resourceful. However, said resourcefulness has varying results.
