I am not a decorator.

I’m not sure what exactly I was wanting, aside from some simple heart-shaped gingerbread cookies with some decorative icing. 

The cookies turned out nice enough. Recipe from Martha.

The scene in which I made the royal icing, however, verged on I Love Lucy material.  Sometimes when I get a little self-congratulatory (“Good job, me, for freezing egg whites a couple months ago and using them for this icing! You are so resourceful.”), I make up for it by doing something stupid. Like dumping a cup of powdered sugar in the bowl while the whisk is running at high speed on the hand mixer. White explosion. Fine sugar dust everywhere. 

And, of course, I was wearing black.

Most people know not to do these things.

Another thing most people know not to do is to fill your icing gun from the top end. But I did that. Even as I was doing it, I knew I should have started the other way (i.e., fill it from the tip end), but I didn’t stop. Instead, I just put my finger over the tip to keep the icing from oozing out, which made things extremely cumbersome and messy.

Finally, that tip was just too large to make anything meaningful. At one point, I was so frustrated that I just let the pastry tip hang over the cookie to see what happened.

I gave up. This plate was pretty much the best of the bunch. It got an “Awwww.” Maybe that’s all I wanted.

Happy Valentine's