Warning: This is not a recipe, it is a cautionary tale.

I decided to make my grandmother’s cookies. These are press cookies, flower shaped, and you put either an M&M or a bit of dried fruit in the middle. (I don’t know what sadist picks the dried fruit out of a fruitcake and sticks it in the center of a cookie when the stores are full of M&Ms.)

I hadn’t made these cookies in a long time, and I’m still not sure what I did wrong, but I was having trouble getting the dough to drop properly. I decided that perhaps the dough was too warm, so I put it in the fridge for a bit. You can guess what happened: the dough was so hard that I thought I would break my press, or my wrist. It took all of my strength to squeeze the dough out.

Now, a cookie sheet is supposed to be smooth and flat on the top. As a natural consequence, the bottom is likely to be smooth and flat as well. So I have a flat, smooth surface sitting on a flat, smooth countertop; and I’m pressing down with all my might on a cookie press. Just as I’m almost done, the cookie press comes down at a slight angle and the cookie sheet spins like crazy.

Centrifugal force takes over, and the raw cookies fly in all directions around the kitchen: under the stove, on top of the refrigerator, over there on the wall, no matter where you look there is cookie dough. We don’t even have a dog to help clean up!

I’m not the kind of guy who likes to give up on a proven method, even if the method was proven wrong; so after cleaning up the mess I start over. Ten minutes later, I’m again cleaning up cookie dough from all over the kitchen.

As I said, I still don’t know what I did wrong; but I’m not sure if the world is ready for another batch of my grandmother’s cookies.