Did someone say cookies?? Me. It was me. I said cookies, haha! This morning, I woke up to the cacophony of our backyard chickens squawking loudly to be let out of their coop, somehow, I immediately thought of cookies. Weird? Yes. An adventure in the making? Yes again, only I didn’t know it would take me almost half of the day. Whoops!
The cookies I was thinking of were from a cookie recipe I had found the night before while sifting through Joanna Gaines’ second Magnolia Table cookbook. By the way, I love and own BOTH of those books, and the first one is awesome, too. This particular recipe is for round cookies and this morning, thanks to the chickens, I envisioned chicken-shaped cookies. Lucky for me, I have a chicken-shaped cookie cutter already! Anyways, the recipe is called “Crew’s Cookies,” and they have icing on them. Sounds simple, right? Well, I have this knack for complicating…errrr…customizing things. Here is what it looked like at our house today:
- Find cookbook. It wasn’t too hard, since I had just been perusing it.
- Locate recipe and gather all the ingredients.
- Make ingredient substitutions for items we cannot eat, or ingredients not on hand.
- Follow recipe, with the exception of changing the circle shape described in the recipe to a rolled-out dough so I can punch out the chicken shapes.
- Refrigerate dough.
- Roll out dough until flattened.
- Punch out chicken shapes…fail miserably. Ball up dough and put back into the fridge.
- Re-roll out dough, quicker this time so it stays more firm.
- Manage to get 2 chicken cookies transferred onto the baking sheet without ruining the shape.
- Bake 2 cookies.
- Pull them out of the oven to realize they have lost their shape and now look nothing like chickens.
- Eat evidence.
- Decide to roll out more dough, then place flattened dough (on parchment paper) onto a cookie sheet and place into freezer before using the cookie cutter.
- Successfully punch out 6 frozen chicken cookies, and bake them for 10 minutes.
- It worked!! They look like chickens!
- Repeat freezing, punching, and baking process until all dough is used up. This took much longer than I had anticipated. Two and a half hours later, I was done baking my “one batch” of cookies.
- Let cookies cool completely while making up the icing, following the recipe.
- Icing is not looking like its supposed to…too runny…add more powdered sugar.
- Taste icing. Yuck. Start over.
- Make new icing. Turns out better this time! Yay!
- First attempt to decorate a chicken-shaped cookie. My kids would have done a better job when they were two.
- Eat evidence. (At least it tasted great!)
- Decorate another cookie, using a different technique.
- Not an improvement. Eat evidence.
- Try a third technique, take a picture, take a vote on social media. Not a win.
- Attempt to eat evidence, way too sweet. Feeling a little bit overly-sugared now.
- Throw away evidence.
- Finally figure out how to decorate quickly so the icing doesn’t drip so much. WIN!!!!
- Decorate remainder of cookies.
- Give some away to neighborhood kids…they loved them!
- Skip dinner due to being stuffed full of cookies.
So now you have visualized my chicken cookie adventure. It was a fun day, full of substitutions, trials, do-overs, and delicious cookies, even if they didn’t look beautiful. I found joy in the process, and was even able to share some of that with the neighborhood, too! I was thinking that this is a great comparison to life sometimes. Some days don’t look like we expected them to. Sometimes, we have to make substitutions, use an alternate plan, or change what we were thinking of doing all together. Sometimes, our best plans fail and become a mess. Sometimes, we have to eat the evidence. OK, maybe that one not so much, but I think you get my point.
Being willing to roll with what’s happening and find the joy in it is a skill we can all practice…and it’s so worth it. Maybe my chicken cookies were a mess and took me half a day to make. I had a few choices. I could have scrapped the whole idea, thrown everything away, and given up in annoyance. I’ve been known to do that. But this time, I took a new approach and I’m so happy I did! I kept on trying and it was actually fun! The kids looked on, and laughed with me. They also helped me eat the evidence. It’s a fun memory we made instead of a “fail” to look back on unhappily. We also came up with many jokes as to what the title of this article would be…most sounded as if I was including actual chickens in the cookies…OH MY!!! But we had a good laugh together, that’s for sure.
My encouragement for you today is to keep on trying, keep on seeking the joy. Don’t give up just because something is coming out unexpectedly. And please let me know if you have any ideas for my GOAT-shaped cookie cutter…