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.