Alison Rosen Is Your New Best Friend

Yes, fine, I won ANOTHER award.

Cookie party prize winners (L to R: Natali, honorable mention for her snickerdoodles; Jill, best looking for her ice cream cookie sandwiches; Seven, most creative for her cookie hamburgers; Ann, best tasting for her peanut butter cookies; me, tackiest for my sugar cookie disasters)

Over the weekend I won another award. I swear to God you guys, the accolades are coming fast and furious which is just the risk you take when you’re extraordinarily gifted, I suppose. This one was for Tackiest Cookies which, if you can believe it, wasn’t the prize I was originally going for. I know! It’s a gas!

Can you believe I didn’t buy these in a store?

It all started like this: I was invited to a cookie party hosted by Courtney Friel where there were going to be some prizes handed out. “Got that fucker in the bag,” I yelled loudly while packing a sack lunch. I put out a call for award-winning recipes on my blog and then I forgot about the whole thing. A few days before the party, still searching for inspiration’s butt slap, I took to the internet and began poking around. I found a recipe for pumpkin butterscotch cookies but also saw something on a message board that intrigued me.

A woman was talking about making “Christmas mice” where you take balls of sugar cookie dough, form them into something egg shaped, bake them and then stick small candy canes into the fatter end to make the tails and use sliced almonds for the ears and dots of white decorator icing for the eyes and a red hot for the nose. They sounded really cute, and this is coming from someone who doesn’t like mice.

The day before the party, or maybe a couple days before, I talked to my friend Koryn who was to be my cookie-baking partner in crime about the whole thing. She was excited about decorating the cookies and said she had some cookie cutters and I said something about pumpkin butterscotch but nothing about the mice. Maybe I hadn’t seen the recipe yet? It’s all very hazy as most disasters are. I just know that at some point I harbored fantasies of working long into the night on Friday to make my cookie masterpieces and Friday came and went and I didn’t do fuck one on the cookies.

So Satuday, day of the party, rolls around and I wake up late and text Koryn. I tell her I’m strangely nervous about our lack of cookie prep time and set a time to begin baking. She writes back and tells me not to stress and that this is going to be fun. I take a moment to reflect on how she’s totally right and this IS going to be fun and then I erase her from my phone because she lacks the proper killer instinct. I can’t have these losers cluttering my brain space before a big competition.

I hit the stores to buy ingredients. Brooklyn is strangely devoid of red hots so I pull out all my hair and eat it. Then I buy M&M minis instead.

Koryn comes over with cookie cutters and flour and a rolling pin as I’m rolling the dough into egg shaped balls for the mice and putting them on the cookie sheet. “Are you sure they’re supposed to look like that?” she asks. I say that I’m not sure, actually. She suggests we do a couple test cookies just to be safe. It’s a good thing I listened to her because I would have loaded the whole sheet with dough balls and then ruined all the dough since the minute it hit the oven it spread out into a formless puck.

Yum!

“Oh fuck!!!!!!!!!!” I calmly stated from the other room as I revisited the recipe. Apparently you had to use cream cheese sugar cookie dough which is not that same as regular sugar cookie dough and also you’re supposed to add unsweetened cocoa so your mice are mousy brown. I guess this is why it’s good to actually read the recipe and not just get the gist.

“Should I start making some stars?” Koryn asked. She began rolling out the dough while I sat in the corner weeping and rocking back and forth. Then I did some mad libs and went out for Thai.

Five hours and four manicures later, I returned to find the dough wasn’t holding the star shapes either. We did the only thing we could: dropped blobs of it on the baking sheet and shoved a bunch of nuts and M&Ms in them and made jokes about winning the award for tackiest cookie. But even that seemed like a pipe dream. Surely there would be some fantastically ugly cookies, not just accidentally boring sad looking ones like ours.

We boxed up the sugary disappointment and made our way to the party, late and dispirited, considering ditching the things and just buying cookies on the way.

Well thank goodness we didn’t because everyone thought the cookies were SO CUTE in a  “oh look, a five year old made some cookies!” kind of way. This must have been how Picasso felt!

Here’s part of the spread. The cookies in the tin on the left won best tasting.

Here’s more of the spread and some legs and shoes.

And here are some of the cookie party attendees looking lovely. (From L to R: Natali Del Conte, Michelle Gielen, Jill Dobson, me, Seven Chaperon, Ann Browning, Andrea Dvorkin, Sara Moga, Lauren Sivan, Courtney Friel, Megan Glaros. Note Courtney’s adorable dog by the table)

But that was just the beginning of my marathon party session. Post cookie party I went to Natali’s for some in-between party couch sitting on and then we went to another holiday party where this happened. It was a shame, too, because it was some of the best food I’ve ever had the pleasure of dropping.