Christmas Cookies: Expectations vs. Reality

When you think of Christmas disasters, you normally would think of family drama, exhausting dinners, and gift-giving chaos. In this case, Christmas cookie baking can be part of the mayhem. 

Since the holiday season has arrived, many festivities have come to the surface. One of the most common Christmas season activities is cookie baking. With that comes finding a recipe, baking, and decorating. Sometimes the end result is not exactly what you would expect. However, for us, the outcome was even better than anticipated.

Sugar cookies are a classic Christmas cliché. Usually, picture-perfect icing and edges come to mind with Pinterest and Instagram worthy delights. However, sometimes “not perfect” is extraordinary.

On our adventure of sugar cookie making, we strived to find a simple recipe we would easily succeed at, or so we thought. The recipe we chose is shown below, taken from All Recipes Easy Sugar Cookie guidelines. 

Ingredients:

2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

1 cup butter, softened

1 ½ cups white sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Procedure:

Mix the dry ingredients together and the wet ingredients separately then gradually adding them together.

We also made simple chocolate icing with just mixing powdered sugar, milk, vanilla extract, and melted chocolate together. 

Although this is a simple recipe, we made a rookie mistake. It had a little something to do with butter. The recipe called for one cup of butter. Two sticks of butter is equal to one cup. We microwaved the sticks separately, and simply forgot to add the second stick to the mix. Whoops! 

This unpretentious mistake actually worked in our favor. As we eyed the baking cookies in the oven, we noticed the size of the delicious treats increasing. Once we popped the cookies out of the oven, they were huge. They looked like biscuits. When we tried them, they tasted like it too. Our mistake, which we thought was colossal, was actually a happy accident. As Bob Ross once said, “We don’t make mistakes, we just have happy accidents”.

This journey of cookie baking also shows that expectation don’t always meet reality.

Expectation:

Reality:

New and Improved Recipe:

Ingredients:

2 ¾ cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon baking powder

*½ cup butter, softened

1 ½ cups white sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

*extra flour and water to correct consistency

Procedure:

Mix the dry ingredients together and the wet ingredients separately then gradually adding them together.

We hope you enjoy this recipe and take away the important message that out of mistakes can come success.