Cookies are Hard

Not this past Valentine's Day, but perhaps around the Valentine's Day before, I made cookies as a surprise for Andrew. Sugar cookies, I recall, a full recipe of them. Decorating them got to be a little old so I only decorated some of them and left the rest sitting on the cooling rack.

That isn't exactly the most optimal way to take care of left over cookies. In fact, it could be argued that that isn't taking care of them at all.

Be that as it may, that's what I did with my cookies.

Andrew's family came over sometime after Valentine's Day and the cookies were still sitting out on the counter. Now they were more like hard tack but sweet nonetheless, so I was still eating them.

Emily asked if she could have one. Since I was still eating them I didn't think twice before telling her she could. So she had one.

Apparently it was a little dry because she said, "Ew! These cookies are hard!"

Our marriage was so young at this point that brutal honesty wasn't the norm yet. Emily was told that what she said wasn't polite--don't want to offend the new daughter-in-law, after all.

She tried fruitlessly to recover. To this day I'm still teased about hard cookies (brutal honesty is now considered okay, I guess) and Emily about mentioning my cookies were hard without any tact.

I can make good cookies, I promise...if I don't over bake them or leave them uncovered for a few days they really turn out alright!

Well, it's about a week past the "holiday season" and our kitchen counter is still littered with treats, none of which I made. There are a few packages of cookies, some caramels, more candy canes than we will ever possibly be able to use, and a good size pile of chocolate. We also have some crackers and a package of peanut butter cookies in our cupboard. That's a lot of junk food.

Andrew is in the middle of creating a website for the MPLA conference. He's been working on it for a long time doing some pretty complicated things. Currently he's creating a way to accept credit card payments, kind of like PayPal, kind of. The other day he vented at me in a very frustrated tone,

"I hate cookies!! They're so hard!"

Taken aback, it took me a few minutes to gather my thoughts. My first reaction was to defend my baking--it's not always bad. In fact, sometimes it's downright delicious, if I do say so myself. I just happen to have a lot of interesting things happen to me in the kitchen, that's all; and those interesting experiences make for interesting outcomes, baking-wise.

Then I realized that we had delivered all the cookies I had baked and there were none in the house.

So I went to get him some cookies from the cupboard...but that just wouldn't make sense since he just said he hated them.

I couldn't think of what he meant at all, so removing all the truculence from my voice I called out sweetly,

"What cookies, honey?"

"The stupid cookies for this website! I can't get them to work right!"

Oh...those cookies. Well, by all means, hate them--as long as you like my cookies we're on good terms. Love me, love my cookies.

(By the way, he has the cookies working now and he's a much happier boy!)