So it’s the holiday season. And I figured, “What better way to get in the holiday spirit than baking?” Boy was I wrong.

Cue intense cooking montage.

So I started with the essentials. You always have to have some sugar cookies out on the table, so when your family starts to argue, you’ll be able to snatch a few cookies and slip down your chair and under the table.

It all starts with your dry ingredients. The instructions say “sift,” but if I’m being honest, I don’t even know what that means, so I just ignored that and dumped them all in a bowl. And if we’re being brutally honest, I didn’t even mix them together. Using a measuring cup, which was actually warped due to my mom putting it in the dishwasher, I scooped up three cups of flour, ¾ teaspoon baking powder and ¼ teaspoon of salt. I set them aside.

Next I mixed together one cup of sugar and one cup of unsalted butter, not regular butter but unsalted butter. I didn’t have time to soften the butter, so I just threw it in the microwave and gave it a quick zap. I can’t vouch that it was a good idea though, because the cookies came out tasting like wet cardboard. Anyways, once the sugar and unsalted butter were nicely combined, I added one egg and one tablespoon of milk to the mix and whipped it all together.

Now, this is where I really started to mess up. You see I realized that my dry ingredients were in a large bowl while the liquids were in a small bowl, so I couldn’t exactly pour the dry ingredients into the liquid because there would be no room. So me, being the intellectual that I am, figured baking instructions can work inversely. I mean, they should right? No. Wrong. Oh so very wrong.

I ended up just pouring all the liquid ingredients on top of my not-even-mixed-together dry ingredients, and trying to mix that together. Let’s just say my mixer was very overwhelmed, and it ended up breaking. This led to me just rolling up my sleeves and digging in there with my own hands. After about 15 minutes of no progress, I began adding extra milk. By the end I added about half a cup more milk than recommended, but by this point I was willing to do anything.  

Finally, the dough started to form. I balled it up and wrapped it in about an inch-thick layer of Saran Wrap. I carefully placed my creation in the fridge overnight. By the morning, the dough was as solid as a rock, and I was going to miss my ride to school if I didn’t bake these darn cookies quickly, so I just placed the dough in a huge ball in the oven until it was soft enough to roll.

Again, I can’t vouch that this was a good idea. I grabbed a bag of powdered sugar, sprinkled it all over my counter and got to rolling. After realizing cutting each cookie was taking too long, I just began pinching off a small amount of dough and flattening it out in my hand until it vaguely formed a circular shape. The cookies only needed to bake for about eight minutes at 375°F. I pulled the pan out and the cookies looked more like biscuits than sugar cookies. They also tasted more like biscuits than sugar cookies. A word of advice: if you’re looking to get in the holiday spirit and you’re thinking of doing that by baking, just don’t.