Crooked Ass Quilts, Meet Shitty Ass Cookies.

I decided that I was going to bake cookies for my kids' teachers this year. And not just any old cookies. I am not talking about squeezing out some pre-made sugar cookie dough and dumping the obligatory green and red sugar sprinkles on top. No sir-ee. I was going to make some fancy morsels.

I bought cute little cookie boxes and festive parchment paper.

I bought fancy chocolate bars, like ginger-infused dark, raspberry chocolate and chipotle chili chocolate. 

Best of all, I snagged the best shortbread recipe ever, courtesy of a baker who works with my husband. 

My plan was to make 4 cookies per box. One was going to be a rosemary-shortbread snowman, and the rest would be plain shortbread, shaped like Christmas trees, candy canes and sleighs and dipped in the three chocolates (one flavor per cookie, of course.) They were going to be something special.

But, true to form, where I think I can just do something at the eleventh hour and have it all work out perfectly, I waited until the evening before to start these things. It's just shortbread, right? You can't f*ck that up. 

Oh, yes. Yes you can.

Now don't get me wrong. These cookies TASTED excellent. I made a top-notch cookie. The problem was that shortbread has a tendency to spread - even when you think you've outsmarted it by chilling your shapes in the fridge before you bake them. Well, long story short - the snowmen got all puffy and ended up looking like something the kids made and nothing like the professional delights I had envisioned.

Not only that, but I had printed out these labels to explain which cookie was what. Nadja came up to me and asked, "what's this shape?" "Oh, that's the sleigh," I said, "these are the labels." To which Nadja responded, "I don't see a sleigh." I looked closer at the cookie cutter and realized my mistake. "That's because it's a dove," I said as I crumpled up the labels and threw them out.

So at about 8PM, with not one chocolate bar even melted yet, I realized the futility of it all and said, no way can I hand anyone these things as a gift. I wish I took a picture before I ate them all.

It's not so bad, though. Everyone got sick on Friday morning with a nasty upper-respiratory bug and no one went to school anyhow. Other than feeling the heaviness of a pound of butter in my intestines, no harm no foul.