Another Spritz Cookie Fail!

My mother was a great cook.  When I was a kid she let my sister and me help her, but she never wanted to give up complete control.  She wanted to be near the kitchen to hover and make sure we were doing everything just right.  One thing she made that I really loved was chocolate spritz cookies -- a soft cookie dough pressed through a cookie press to make little shapes.  She made these every year without fail at Christmas time and I loved helping her with them.

Today I remembered something I haven't thought about for decades: an occasion when Mom let me make spritz cookie dough without her help.  I must have been 10 or 11.  It was my turn the next day to bring a snack to a Camp Fire Girl meeting and I convinced her that I could make spritz cookie dough all by myself while she was working and then we could shape and bake the cookies later.  I proudly melted the chocolate and mixed up the dough on my own and set it aside to bake with her that evening.  I felt very proud of myself.

However, when it was time to shape the cookies after dinner we ran into some trouble; the dough wouldn't go smoothly through the cookie press.  Turns out I hadn't melted the chocolate squares quite carefully enough and there were little bits of unmelted chocolate in the dough -- pretty tiny chunks, but not big enough to fit through the little holes in the cookie press disks.  We ended up just shaping the dough by hand into little circles instead and the world went on turning, but in my memory she really gave me a hard time for that mistake.  The first time she trusted me to do a baking chore by myself and I had blown it!  I hadn't thought about that day in decades until today.

I am now quite a few years older than my mother was on the occasion of my memorable Spritz cookie fail.  I am also on some fairly strong pain pills while waiting for a back problem to be fixed.  They work, but they also make me kind of sleepy and absent-minded and lead to silly mistakes.  Still, Christmas isn't Christmas without cookies and today I decided it was the perfect days to make chocolate Spritz cookies.  I mixed up the dough and put it into the cookie press, thinking how nice it was to use the old favorite cookie recipes I remembered from childhood.  And then something else happened that I remembered from childhood: the dough had trouble fitting through the cookie press disks -- tiny little chunks of unmelted chocolate exactly like all those years ago!  I had forgotten to stir the chocolate carefully to make sure it was completely melted before I mixed it into the dough.  I was really mad at myself but started to see the funny side to it too.  Just when we think we're finally grown up we find ourselves regressing to childhood mistakes.  Nobody really grows up; we just like to think we do....

I managed to get a lot of the dough through the press, but many of the cookies are kind of "freckled" or misshapen.  Some bits of the dough wouldn't go through at all and I had to fish those bits out and make little circles by hand.   And you know what?  They aren't beautiful but they still taste good.  Life goes on and we'll have some nice cookies for Christmas.  I guess that's a double lesson from Mom -- strive for the best, but learn from your mistakes and improvise when you have to!

Here's wishing everyone a happy holiday free from cookie disasters, but also a sense of humor to get through the little things that sometimes go wrong.