The Cake Chemist does cookies??

It appears the Cake Chemist has been a pretty good girl this year because Santa brought her several great goodies, but two that are going to make cake projects much easier. The first one is a new KitchenAid mixer!! When I opened the box, I'm pretty sure I heard a choir of angels start singing. I now understand why people would look at me like I was insane when I said I was using a cheap hand mixer. This thing is so great. If you don't have one, go get one. Don't pay your mortage this month if you have to. (This is a joke - I do NOT endorse skipping payments on your house!)

Isn't it beautiful???

He also brought me a Cricut Cake tool kit. I wasn't sure how helpful this would be, but I love having extra tools and gadgets so I asked for it. I'm glad I did! If you don't have this for your CC, you should seriously consider it. Before this, I would use a small sharp knife to cut out the smaller pieces. If you know me at all, you know I do NOT need to be playing with knives! Ha ha!

So, to get some good play time in with my new toys, I decided to try something new with my CCM - making cookies! I mixed up a quick and easy recipe from my girl Martha for some sugar cookies and rolled them out before throwing into the freezer. This worked great as they were ready to go as soon as I was! Plus, you don't have to cook them all at once, which is definitely a "good thing" when you have no self control. (like me!)

Important disclaimer - I do not make cookies often. I kind of hate making cookies because of the whole short cooking time thing. I loose interest and burn them usually. Also, I hate rationing out portions. Anyone who has seen me cut a cake will tell you I know nothing about portions!

I was so surprised how easy this was. It's easier than cutting fondant because you don't have the problems with stickiness or being dried out like the fondant. The worst problem I had was with the thickness. I wanted it to be thick so it's not too crispy.  



Feeding into the Cricut



Cutting the dough





Like I said, I had a bit of a problem with the height of the dough versus the rollers in the CCM. Basically, the rollers would smooth out the dough. It wasn't too big of a deal because you can just peel it out regardless. I guess the sides might not have been perfectly smooth, but this is a cookie, so the sides are going to spread anyway and it will look good after baking anyway.

See where the rollers undid the cuts?

Here they are all cut out on the cookie sheet. I made one small one because I ran out of room on the mat to make them all the large size. The final verdict was they are fun (my 3 year old) but the 3 inch size is way too big for one cookie (my husband).

This brings me to another point - the sizing. It's a little confusing how to figure size on something like this. Notice it is not a square shape. The wing-to-wing size is definitely longer than the head-to-tail. So how do you figure how big each side will be? Well, this is a question I have yet to figure out. Unless I have a helpful reader to point me in the right direction, I'll probably have to ask my old friend Google for answers!