Last week Hal took Archer to the store with a recipe for candy cane cookies he'd just torn from a magazine, a similar recipe, he said, to the one his mother used to make for him. Hal is the resident baker in our household as I am afraid of baking anything other than potatoes and have a phobia of recipes that require measuring cups. And mixers. And extract. Hal in the past has made all homemade cakes and cookies with the kids and I love him for it. Even when they explode and the frosting script is illegible. The greatest cake I ever did eat was the birthday cake Hal made for my 25th birthday. It caved in and was in a billion crumbs when he served me a slice. It was the sexiest thing I ever did see. I devoured my giant piece of cake before stripping down to my tassels.
The boys returned from the store with their hands full of ingredients including neon food coloring, which seemed to them a lot more interesting than your typical primary color whatever. Hal started from scratch, as he does, with Archer holding the measuring cups, them together mixing, rolling, baking.... and once again turned out the most amazing cookies I'd ever seen. Seriously genius. And I'm not just saying that.
"These are the COOLEST cookies I've ever seen!"
"Really?"
"YES!"
They did not look anything like the picture in the magazine. (They never do. That would be boring.) Nor did they taste anything like I expected they would (Ditto the above). To be honest the cookies were kind of terrible. They tasted like peppermint-flavored Play-Doh. We devoured them anyway. Even I couldn't get enough. Because somehow, even in their terribleness, they were the most amazingly delicious cookies I had ever had and I couldn't. Stop. Eating them. I couldn't stop!
Later on, after nursing my peppermint-play-doh stomachache, I totes busted out the tassels.
"You really liked my cookies, eh?"
"Not really. I sure do like like you, though..."
GGC
