Tossing the Cookies

It's two hours until I'm due for a Christmas cookie exchange and I'm nearly at the brink of calling it a day, throwing on my elastic-waist pants (you know you have a pair too, the comfy ones that never let you down), pouring an extra-strength eggnog, and calling in for pizza for the second time this weekend.

Oy, the holidays - I forgot how wonderful they are. And how they can almost certainly drive you to that special place we call Insanity.

All went well until I hit the kitchen running this morning, scarfing down a bagel and dreaming of the awesome Chai Tea Eggnog Cookies I would bake. Straight out of this month's Southern Living magazine, the recipe looked easy enough - tea, eggnog, a couple eggs, a sugar cookie mix, and a simple little glaze.

Well, simple it ain't. As I am always looking for a shortcut, I decided to use one of those logs of cookie dough you can conveniently find in your grocer's dairy case. I unwrapped it from its shrinky casing, dumped in the eggs and whatnot, and whirred it all up with my hand mixer - the one that gets used about twice a year.

The results had me stupefied. The mixture resembled icing - Chai-flavored and tasty, but nonetheless, no cookie mix texture I'd ever seen before. Using a couple of what Scott termed as "those sailor words you like so much," I dumped the mix in the trash, a little more than perturbed. I figured the handy Joy of Cooking couldn't let me down, so I grabbed it, hunted down a sugar "drop cookie" recipe, and went to mixing yet again.

And again with the texture. A little too creamy, greasy, and completely not working for me as I tried to roll the slippery mess into 1/2 inch wide balls. More sailor words ensued - the USS Hormone was out to sea and pissed.

Scott, being the dear he always is, asked me what was wrong, from a safe distance of course, and said, "How about chilling the dough?"

Well, sure enough, had I read through the entire little note section on drop cookies before I started, I would have learned that you can chill the mix to get it firm to roll into those precious little cookie balls.

Bollocks.

Acknowledging my husband's brilliance, I shoved the mix in the fridge and went to decompress for about half an hour. Returning to the scene of the cookie crime, I tried rolling the dough and again, even as I used carefully powdered sugar-dusted hands, the mix still wouldn't form into shapes, instead adhering to the nooks between my fingers and under my nails.

I managed to get them on to the baking sheets and into the oven. Once they were out and cooled on racks, I attempted to mix up powdered sugar, nutmeg and eggnog to form a glaze. Instead of looking like the pretty pale sweet glaze on the magazine's page, it looked like a watery chocolate pool of poo.

Feeling absolutely over it by this point, I trashed that glaze and re-did the process, omitting the nutmeg to keep the glaze looking more creamy than crappy. It kinda worked, but the glaze ran off the cookies and onto the stove burners. Fantastic.

So here I am with barely glazed cookies, feeling rather glazed myself.

Here's the recipe, if you dare. Don't come crying to me if you find it a disaster as well. I'll just be the one huddled on the couch, watching Love Actually for the sixteenth time.

In my comfy pants, of course.