At first when starting this cookie business, I was thinking cookies will be easy enough to make, icing might consist of a bit of trial and error but would still be reasonably easy. Well lets just say looking back at that now, I was extremely wrong and that we ‘flearning’ is just part of life and that sometimes you need to celebrate your failures.
My plan for the production of the cookies was to make the icing the day before so that it would be a bit thicker when I iced it and when it came to the actual making the day after I would make 3 different types of the base cookies which consisted of cocoa, lemon and vanilla. I would then allow them to cool and ice different designs on to them which included reindeers, snowmen, marble and flowers.
To be able to make these cookies with minimal cost and not having to mess around looking at lots of recipes I decided to find one that had simple and cheap ingredients that would be bland but once I customise and add the lemons/vanilla/cocoa would be full of flavour.
My altered ingredient list for each recipe
I was unsure about what cookie designs to put on the cookies so I decided that I would find some inspiration on pintrest then get feedback from different people. The feedback that I received was definitely constructive as people said that some of the Christmas ones looked a bit creepy and that the doughnuts had warts. Then based of this feedback I decided that I was going to make 4 different designs; marbling, snowman, flowers & reindeer.
When I’d started making the cookies everything was running smoothly as I’d prepared the icing the day before and left it to chill overnight, made the cookie dough in the morning and left it in the fridge for a few hours. Then all of a sudden lots started to go wrong. While the cookies were sitting in the oven some were kind of deflating and becoming larger and thinner while others were staying the same shape. I didn’t understand the reason behind it, as the dough came from the same batches and before putting them in the oven insured that they were all a similar thickness. After this I continued to persevere and thought that it will be fine I can just slightly alter some of the designs when I ice them.
So I allowed the cookies to then cool overnight then would ice them the next day, except that also didn’t go very well. The first design that I was going to ice on was the marbled ones, so I used a tutorial that I’d previously found in YouTube the day before that seemed easy enough. Next time when someone says Before doing something make sure that it’s within your limits and if it isn’t at least learn how to from an ‘expert’ as I seriously should’ve thought about that before starting.
The icing didn’t turn out very well as it was just making biggest mess ever therefore wasting most of the icing, didn’t look appealing and tasted way too sweet on top of the cookie. I then asked for an opinion from my Dad who recommended doing swirls on top as it wouldn’t make the icing too sweet on top and despite not looking the best would be better than previously.
But sometimes you just have to view this in a different way as across life nothing’s ever going to be perfect and that we learn from our failures and that sometimes you have to celebrate them.