Red and blue make cookies

We had a fund raiser this week for the local staff emergency fund, so I made some cookies. There were some random prizes, including one for the “purpleist” entry. I had my eye on that and decided to make sugar cookies and dye them purple.

They're both purple

Well, I didn’t win, but I learned a lot. First is to not give away your game plan. I lost to a friend who did the same thing I did, only with macrons. She dyed them purple and gave them purple Bailey’s frosting. They were good and looked good. Mine were just good.

And it took two tries to place second! This was a busy week and work, and I had to work late every day, which meant I skipped the gym. On Tuesday, I got home maybe half an hour before I would have finished my gym routine and decided I’d take that opportunity to make a batch.

As I have no purple food coloring, I planned on mixing red – of which I have a huge thing – and blue. And here’s what I learned this week: when you want to dye cookies, you shouldn’t do it after you add in the dry ingredients. It was so ugly. The red and blue didn’t mix together at all, and each color didn’t really dissolve, or whatever it is that food coloring does. I mean, it DID color the food, which, technically, is what it’s supposed to do, but it didn’t blend, either the red and blue or the coloring with the dough.

Better looking with icing

As a result, I got a mix that looked a lot like Jimmy Dean sausage before you cook it, which, although fine for JD, is not a good look if you’re going for a cookie that you want to win a beauty contest. I rolled them into balls anyway, foolishly thinking that maybe when the cookies cooked, the colors would blend better. They didn’t, of course. I have no idea what I was thinking on that one. There was no way I was going to take them to work and enter them into a contest.

At that point in the evening, it was getting late and I thought I’d just make the next batch in the morning – I’ve gotten up and made cookies earlier in the week – but realized I still had to ice them, so I decided to give it another shot that same evening. Starting around 9, I started another batch, but this time I put in the food coloring before adding all the dry stuff. And that was success, to a degree.

Only I’m no artist and I figured out that I didn’t know the proportions to make purple. I dumped in some blue and then added red, but once I mixed everything up, it looked kind of like a gray tinted with purple. Telling myself it was lavender, I went with it and made the cookies. When they were finished, they looked even more gray, which is not a good look for a cookie. The line that kept running through my head was from “Steel Magnolias,” where they talk about the groomscake: “It has gray icing. I don’t even wanna know how to make gray icing,” or something like that. Well, I discovered how to make gray cookies: aim for purple.

Ugly but gluten free

During the week, Laurie had been sending me some photos of her latest cake creations, so I took a picture of the lot of cookies and sent her. She is definitely the baking talent in the family. Mine are good, but hers are good and look good. There’s a difference.

The next morning, I made icing – the idea was for two layers of purple – and I swear it looked brown at first, but in the end, it really was purple. I iced both sets and they both looked a lot better. I told Laurie that everything looks better in the morning and with icing on top!

The baking evening hadn’t even been my only treat that week. My boss’ birthday was on Tuesday, and I dispatched the guy who did the commissary run to buy a gluten-free baked good mix, whatever they had. They had Pilsbury Funfetti, which is a white cake with those little edible confetti-looking things. He got two and I made two 13x9 cake pans, thinking I’d ice make a two-layer cake.

The cake part turned out fine, though my 13x9 pans are somehow different sizes. The problem I had was the icing – I did NOT have an entire box of powdered sugar like I thought I had, and I started the cake after my gym routine that night, meaning I’d showered and was wearing PJs. I weighed the options of changing clothes and going to the store that night and decided it wasn’t worth it and would make due.

Well, boy, it was ugly. First, I’d put a thin layer of icing – which I dyed green, because dying batter is fun! – on the bottom layer and then plopped the top layer on it. Well, that’s the point I realized there is more than one size 13x9, although I am not sure how. I wound up hacking a bunch off the bottom layer. It was tasty but I was kicking myself because I’d iced the bottom layer and by this point it was clear I’d be scrimping for the top. I started trying to sponge the trimmed cake section’s icing on the sides of the cake. On top of that (no pun intended), I did not think to shave off the poofy middle part of the cake and therefore had some gaps between layers on some ends.

I coped the best I could with what I had, using butter-flavored Crisco to make the powdered sugar go a little further. Still, it was pretty thin, like some guy doing a comb-over. I decided to distract from the baldness by using red sugar sprinkles all over the thing. Good thing I have lots of red food coloring.

The end result was by no means Laurie’s Ghostbusters cake, but it served its purpose well, as my boss, while not completely surprised to have a birthday cake, was totally stunned that it was gluten-free.