A Bone to Pick.......

.....with Pillsbury.

Let me explain.

In my short lived experiment with couponing (read about it here) I had purchased some Pillsbury refrigerated cookie dough. I know, I know. I usually make my own cookie dough - it's cheaper and tastes better.

But, I thought, I have a baby and a toddler, and a COUPON, so I'll buy some dough. It'll save me the time of having to make sugar cookie dough, then refrigerate, then roll, then cut out, then bake, then frost before eating our Christmas cookies. I get to skip two steps! Woo-hoo!

Was it worth it?

Um, not so much.

Perhaps a picture demonstration would be better? Ok. Here you go:


Exhibit A -

Notice the size differential between the cookie cutter and the resulting cookie? WTF! When I make my own sugar cookies THEY RETAIN THEIR SHAPE AND SIZE. Period.

Not enough, you say? Want more evidence? I give you Exhibit B -

Star of Christmas Cookie Cutter and resulting blob of confused squares. Again, I do not know what happened to these cookies. Does Pillsbury put some kind of super-human strength baking powder in their cookie-dough? Do they not understand that while it is OK for your chocolate chip cookies to conquer and divide among the cookie sheet it is quite impolite for sugar cookies to do so.



And, yes, there's more. Exhibit C-



Went in a Gingerbread Man, came out Frosty the Snow Man. This poor guy gained about 50 lbs. just because he agreed to undertake baking.



Exhibit D -

From left to right starting at the top: heart, bell, heart, bell, stocking, heart, stocking, gingerbread man. Oh-so-wrong on so many levels.

And finally, for your viewing pleasure, finished and frosted cookies-

To top off this wreckage of cookies, we had placed the remains of cutting out shapes into a blob and decided to bake a "large" sugar cookie by itself. It was the last "batch" that went in the oven. It was forgotten. Forgotten as the other cookies cooled. Forgotten as we made frosting (the green frosting is mint flavored, YUM!). Forgotten as we frosted the cookies. Forgotten until 30 plus minutes after it went into the over I got up to pee and smelled something off.

Found a large, brown hockey puck in my oven, complete with putrid smell of burnt popcorn wafting through the air.

Ah, the joys of baking. The cookies taste ok, although nothing compares to real butter, which Pillsbury obviously forgot about. And it was fun to see the little kids all covered in flour as Wobbs tried to roll out the dough. And his funny face when he realized his line of paper-cut-out gingerbread men had become poor souls that needed surgical help to regain their shape. My Flower, being the wisest of us all, refused to touch much less take a bite of the cookies.

Happy Advent!!

~H

P.S. Blogger has gone stupid and will not respect my formatting wishes in the above paragraphs.....melding then together as only Pillsbury could do!!! An ironic twist of fate, maybe?