Have you ever seen those posts on Facebook where someone sees the cutest thing on Pinterest and tries to make it…only to fail miserably? However, in true optimist fashion…and with much self-depredation…posts a side-by-side comparison of the two? Yeah…well. I had one of those experiences yesterday. 

First…the turkey is STILL too frozen to remove the giblets so it has to wait till today. Since the oven was unoccupied, I simply HAD to bake…right? I was so excited to use my new-to-me cookie press from the thrift shop. It came from Pampered Chef and had a dozen or more different extruded patterns…all for the amazingly low price of $5! I had the perfect score…or, so I thought.

I found a video on YouTube with a recipe for the PERFECT Vanilla Spritz Cookies. It had a couple “secret ingredients”. Vanilla Bean Paste which I JUST happened to buy at TJ Maxx when I bought the Indian Ginger I used for the Appalachian Gingerbread. Powdered sugar…which I just happened to find a bag of stuffed in the back of the cupboard I cleaned out this week over the microwave. And, cornstarch. Apparently, these magic ingredients create the perfect light and crisp Spritz Cookies for your holiday baking needs.

Right.

It took for-e-ver to mix the dough. I should have used the big KitchenAid mixer, but opted for the handheld instead. When I finally got all those dry ingredients incorporated in the butter, it was a pretty stiff dough. Come to find out afterward, I really could have added some more flour because it was raining and high humidity outside and I was working with the kitchen window open. 

Once I finally got the dough mixed and chose my design, I set to filling the tube on the cookie press. Back in the day when I tried this before, the press I had was only about an inch to an inch and a half across and made tiny little cookies. You could easily get three or four dozen out of a batch of dough. The Pampered Chef press is easily two and half inches across and one tube full of dough nearly filled a cookie sheet. The raw cookies were pretty big and I knew they would spread so I placed them pretty far apart. I only got eight on each cookie sheet.

The first thing that happened was…the cookie would not stick to the parchment paper, even though I had tacked it down at all four corners with a bit of raw dough. I took the paper off and buttered the pan. Nope…still wouldn’t stick. The dough just lifted off with the press every time I picked it up. So, I tried putting the pan in the freezer for a few minutes. This time, about 3/4 of the cookies stuck. The rest I had to scrape off and try again till I was finally successful.

The first batch was perfect…very slightly brown at the edges…but they were pretty flat and didn’t hold their pressed shape much at all. Disappointing. The second batch were placed in the freezer for a few minutes before I baked them. They came out too brown and no better shaped…but still edible. By the third batch, I was just about ready to throw the whole mess out the window…batter AND press. I had dough left and it would NOT stick, so I gave up, rolled the dough in balls the size of a small walnut and baked them anyway.

Moral of the story is…sometimes those really great gadgets you find in a thrift shop are there for a reason. At least I was only out $5 and not what it would have cost new. I’ll just clean it up and take it back to the thrift shop the next time I have a bag of donations. maybe someone else will have better luck with it than I did.

At the end of the day, I have to admit, the cookies were really tasty…light with a crispy bite and a melt in your mouth texture. Still, a full two and a half hours to bake two dozen cookies was not very time efficient. We ate some with a little ice cream last night after the news. So, all was not lost and a lesson was learned. I need a tad more “instant gratification” than that when I’m trying to make a ton of cookies for holiday gift trays. I’ll stick to bigger batches of drop cookies for that.

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“for though the righteous fall seven times, they rise again, but the wicked stumble when calamity strikes.”

Proverbs 24:16 NIV