Sunday, May 24, 2009

Horrors! or the time the cookies came out flesh-colored

This afternoon I found my mind filled with a delicious vision of little round shortbread cookies with pale pinkish-orange frosting. Perfectly formed. Delicately adorned. Perhaps a hint of almond tucked in there somewhere.

Like we humans are often inclined to do with beautiful visions, I decided to try my best to convert it to reality.

So, after a dinner of mozzarella sticks from Charlie's and some salad, Bubs and I combined two recipes (because the dream I held in my mind more approximately resembled something halfway between sugar cookies and shortbread cookies) and did a test run to see how a couple turned out. After perfecting the technique, the rest of the baking process went quite smoothly. As the final batch was cooking, I began to whip up some buttercream frosting, a special delight to which my mother had always treated us for birthdays and special occasions. Though she employed time-saving strategies in many areas of homemaking, she would only stoop to store-bought frosting in the most dire of circumstances.

Pinkish-orange, my mind automatically began to work out the colors. Well, orange is red and yellow. And pink of course only needs red food coloring. But I don't want to add too much red, because it will overpower the yellow. A ratio of two drops of yellow to one of red seemed to be drawing out the appropriate hue.

But as I mixed, I began to feel overcome by the sicky-sweet pastel pansiness of the frosting. I needed to tone it down a little bit. If you add the opposite color on the color wheel, it will mute the original color... I recalled. GREEN.

I carefully added one (1) drop of green food coloring. Tentatively I stirred it in. As the color became uniform, the shade started to look familiar, but not in an entirely appealing manner. It looked like something... with dismay, I realized what it resembled: skin. Yes, it looked like skin. Human flesh. My beautiful frosting had turned a peachy, band-aid, crayola crayon skin-color. A cliche Caucasian tone.

I held a spoonful of it up next to my hand. The frosting was actually quite a bit lighter. So Crayola lies, pushes an unrealistic standard of race, I thought, wondering if I could get it to match my own, since hey we're already well past disgusting with this color.

I added a few more drops of red here, some yellow there, (even a couple more green, so it didn't turn out pure Oompa Loompa). Seriously, it was much more difficult than you might think. After what seemed like twelve thousand drops, I think I got it pretttttty close in the end.

So now there are two dozen cookies plastered with a thin layer of my own outer membrane, sitting - no - practically quivering on our table. YUMMY.

Flesh of my flesh. Indeed.

4 comments:

Bbear said...

Ugh, I hate that ending. It made me want to vomit. So I went and ate a cookie.

Braden said...

Pictuuuuures.

ambrosia ananas said...

You know, that's pretty impressive that you got it to match.

Unknown said...

that sounds so gross. but I'm sure they tasted so good. and your knowledge of colors, and opposites, and bases does impress me.