Success... ish.

After a crazy busy week (did we mention we both work three jobs, Emma's in school full time and Rachael plans parties?) we got together on Saturday to start our first baking adventure!

In honour of our friend Nathon's birthday, we decided to bake some ballet slipper cookies. Nathon is the definition of a guy's guy. For his birthday, we went to a bar to watch the UFC fight and the mere thought of anything sparkly is enough to send the guy running! We're slightly on the girly side - but don't let that fool you! We are better campers than most men we know (and by "we" we mean "Rachael").

We began the night at Sobey's where what was supposed to be a quick shopping trip, turned into quite a mission! Who knew cartons of egg whites were kept right above the actual eggs!? When we got home, we took out our brand spankin' new cookbook, Simply Spectacular Cakes by Peggy Porschen and got to work! Step one: create pastry bags to pipe our frosting. Epic fail. The instructions (cut a rectangle corner to corner to create two triangles) left Rachael baffled! Her piping bag ended up crumpled in the garbage covered in tear drops before we even made our cookie dough. Emma's turned out alright but in the end we decided to pitch them and free-hand it. Big mistake!!

On to mixing frosting. Three ingredients. Infinite problems. Instead of turning into the smooth creamy frosting in the cookbook's photos we ended up with little sugar balls! Luckily with the addition of water things smoothed out... until the next crisis struck! Rachael thought we forgot white food colouring! Horror!! As soon as Emma recovered from laughing, she calmed Rach down by pointing out that the icing was already white. Crisis averted.

 

The cookie dough was next. Considering all of the icing drama, the dough went well! Until we realised we had to chill it for AN ENTIRE HOUR before rolling it out into our slipper shapes. It was 8:00, the party started at 7:00 and we still weren't ready. Our amazing multi-tasking skills kicked in and we threw the dough in the freezer for 20 minutes (approximately 5 minutes too long, FYI) while we got ourselves beautiful.

Once we (the Brunettes and the dough) were ready, we carefully cut out 24 slippers to bake. Easy peasy! Decorating on the other hand, didn't go quite as smoothly. Our friend Melissa had arrived while the cookies were baking and she was a great help in decorating. Emma iced the main colour, Rachael iced the toes and Melissa did the bows. In the end the cookies looked more like multi coloured blobs with small polka dots than ballet slippers. Of the 24 cookies we baked, only 17 survived the decorating process.

In the end the cookies were a hit. We give them an 8/10 for taste and a 10/10 for decorating because they made people laugh.

This weeks tally: "Rachael moments": 1, "Emma moments": 1, the look on Nathon's face when he saw his "party girl" cookie: priceless.

For this week's recipes, leave a message in the comment box!

xoxo Emma and Rachael