The internet is full of holiday cookie recipes, some of them better than others. Every year I try one recipe at random and document how it goes. This year I wanted to try something more aesthetic, maybe something with swirls. With this in mind, I decided to try the Peppermint Pinwheels from tasteofhome.com. Let’s see how this goes.
First, gather the ingredients.
Next, smash that butter then bless it with sugar.
Add one egg and the good Madagascar vanilla (of course if you can’t get your hands on the good vanilla you can just give up and stop trying).
Mix those up then set them aside to let those ingredients have some fun together in private. Now, put together the dry ingredients, starting with the flour.
Then the baking powder. That’s powder, not soda. POWDER.
And salt. Less is more.
Introduce those to the wet ingredients and get to mixing. Imagine it’s a party for awkward singles and your spatula is the savvy, musically-gifted DJ that gets them all moving.
Split the dough up into three parts.
Add peppermint extract to 2 of the blobs.
To one blob, add enough red food colouring to make the special effects team on Dexter proud. To the other, add enough green colour to make Ryan Reynolds a real super suit instead of that half-assed CGI.
Wrap the two peppermint blobs and the plain blob in plastic and shove them in the fridge. Forget about them for 2 hours more than recommended and finish an entire bottle of wine (essential for the next step, I swear).
Use the empty wine bottle to roll out each of the blobs and stack them on top of each other. They’re really sticky. Dust cornstarch on them to try to make it better. Trim them so they fit sort of nicely.
Come to think of it, you probably should have done all that on a piece of wax paper. Curse yourself for an idiot and re-do it.
Roll up!
Wrap and shove in the freezer. Forget about it again and finish another bottle of wine (not neccessary, but hey, it’s the holidays)
Remove from freezer, unroll paper, cut cookies off of the dough log. Forget to take photos. Smash the trimmed dough from earlier together and roll it out (with the new wine bottle, if you want). Use cute cookie cutters to make mini cookies. Put ’em all on a tray and pop ’em into the oven.
Realize that you have made a terrible terrible mistake when the cookies come out as thin lace sheets swimming in pools of greasy butter.
Take a comparison shot of an unbaked star versus a baked star. Wallow in misery at what gruesome things you have created.
Eat them anyway because they taste alright, but honestly you wouldn’t be eating them if you didn’t need immediate comfort in the face of failure. Resolve to do better next year.
Photo Credits: Avery Creed