oh bother. blog

Holden and I were invited to a Holiday Cookie Swap tomorrow, which sounded like tons of fun… until I realized I had to make cookies in advance in order to have something to swap. Duh.
I actually love to bake cookies—my mom and I have our own little Christmas cookie sweatshop every year the weekend before Christmas. But I wasn’t entirely prepared to have cookies ready for this party. So I decided to a cheat a little and get some help from Betty Crocker.

Now, because I don’t want it to actually look like I just made some cookies from a box (well, pouch), I remembered a Pin I saw not too long ago.

If you’ll recall, me and rainbow-colored baked goods don’t always get along, so I figured, at the very least I’d have a fun Pinterest Fail to share with ya’ll. Instead I’m calling this a quasi-win.

The recipe for the Rainbow Pinwheel Cookies comes from Souders Cookery.

[yumprint-recipe id=’3′]Here’s the recipe breakdown, visually:

The best way to really mix the food coloring into the dough is… with your hands. I threw on a pair of disposable gloves (which I own for reasons involving my dog that you don’t want to hear about) and went to town:

The balls really do look like little beach balls once you combine the five different colored grape-sized balls. Wrapping the cylinder into a coiled cookie whilst twisting it is not an easy thing to do.

Because my cookies are nowhere near as airy and perky-looking as the recipe photo I’m calling this a Pinterest Win-ish. I’m wondering if I should have followed the box instructions for drop cookies as opposed to cut-out cookies. The neon colors still make them look pretty cool though. The end result:

Also, this recipe says you’ll get three (3) dozen cookies out of it. Unless I made my cookies waaaay too big (which is a possibility), I’d say 1.5 dozen is more realistic. I actually got 15 cookies out of this recipe… which is not enough for the Swap tomorrow, so I’ll be making my gingerbread men (also out of a box) to supplement.

And while we’re truth-telling, these cookies are pretty time-consuming, what with the splitting of the dough into five different colors and rolling grape-size balls and coils and cylinders and whatnot. So I didn’t actually do myself any favors by cheating. But they look pretty, so oh well!