December Daily - Day 24

Snoopy Christmas Cookies!

Time to make Christmas cookies! It's probably hard to tell the scale of these cookies from the picture, but they are 8 inches tall but 4 inches wide - huge! I got the cookie cutter on eBay about 2 years ago and I thought it was a "normal" size cookie cutter. I bid on this one because it was so much less than all the others. I won the bid and was so happy! Then the cutter arrived. What the heck!? It was gigantic. I looked back at all the other cutters and they were 4 inches tall. Then read the description of the one I got. No wonder this one was so much cheaper than the others!! Shame on me for not noticing the size in the description. Scale does not photograph unless you have a ruler or something next to it and it didn't say "x-large" so I thought it was just a standard size. Oh well. Finally after 2 years I got over the disappointment of it all and decided to actually make cookies with this cutter. I have to tell you, big cookies are a pain. My mistake of not reading that description was coming back to haunt me again. They are so fragile due to their size. Normal size cookies are much easier to deal with and not as delicate. First, there is no 8 inch spatula in my house so transferring them to the cookie sheet was a challenge. They wanted to break at the scored spots on the dough (see in photo). I had to do some repair work once they were on the cookie sheet. When you take them out of the oven, it's even more challenging because they will break and there's no way to fix them. Again, a massive spatula would have helped. Half of them broke right out of the oven at those score lines. I had to make a second batch. With the second batch, I just lifted the baked cookies off the cookie sheet on the parchment paper and let them cook right on the parchment they were baked on. It was the only way. Then during decorating, I found out you can only hold these puppies (pardon the pun) at the sides of the dog house. If you hold it at the bottom or.....well, any other place, they will break because they just are not strong enough to bear the weight. I think I made 20 of them and 10 survived. Will not be making these again! But, I do like how they turned out. And it was a learning experience. This is what I learned.

1. Read the description of everything on eBay. 10 times. Then read it again.

2. Big freakin' cookies are a nightmare to make. Don't do it.

3. Spatula size matters.

4. Red food color requires a lot of it or it just looks pink.

5. Buy a box of cute cookies at the store so if you want to give up after half the batch breaks, you can :)

dough on cookie sheet ready to bake

Just out of the oven,

decorated!