Orange vanilla sugar cookies

Easy enough. These turned out a two-day ordeal.

See all that butter? Two sticks. A pound is four sticks. So eight ounces is two sticks. A cup is eight fluid ounces, but butter is measured by weight.

Well, so what. Let's pretend they're the same things.

It means these cookies will be short. Because they have a lot of fat. 

Let's just go ahead and call them what they are, shortbread sugar cookies.

This sugar is not ordinary. Oh no. This sugar is less refined than that cocaine-sugar you buy all over the place. This sugar is rough. 

Three cups of flour were estimated. But this batch has two sticks of butter, not one, and two eggs, not one.

Did you know that butter is 20% water?

Well, it is!

Plus an extra egg make this dough have a little bit more liquid than ordinary.

So three cups of flour wasn't enough. Another cup was added. And that turned out to be a little too much so the dough is extremely crumbly and difficult to manage. 

But I don't care. I'd rather have it be too dry and too tender than too wet and too tough.

That's the choices we baker-types make based on a million years of experience.

That's collective experience, personal experience would be fifty years.

Remember back at age nine when you used to follow directions?

I was thinking back then, oh man, when I grow up and internalize all this, I'll be like a wizard.

Eye of newt and breath of dying python, 1 pound of dragon scales, and three ounces hen's teeth. Bat wing and 1/2 teaspoon of grasshopper barf, that stuff they eject when you catch them. Thirteen lizard tails that break off when you grab them. One hundred eighty-two butterfly antenna of any kind. Five hundred aphids that get on your tomatoes. One and one-half kitten ears, the wild kind that don't like humans. 

That's what I'll be like when I grow up. A wizard who knows all the recipes.

No dough was wasted in the production of these sugar cookies.

For I am not a dough-waster. No. I am a dough conservationist. 

We baker-type dough conservationists respect the value of butter. Squeezing all those cow udders and churning the cream. Bottling it, keeping it chilled and processing plus transportation and timely marketing. And the trouble gone through to extract vanilla the whole thing is outrageous, and process of refining sugar. And all those eggs that get squeezed out of chicken holes. That's a lot of pain and suffering and toil all around. Extraordinary when you break it all down. So it's not to be wasted. No matter how rich a wizard you've become.

OMG, how high does this stack go?

It's a veritable tower of cookies.

Psych!

It's really not that dramatic.

This took two days because my body broke down.

My head was held on by a thread.

And that thread hurt like a sumabitch. 

Whatever that is.

I had to keep laying down. 

And recover, then boom, there it is back again.

Over and over and over.

Remember when you were a tall skinny teenager and you stood up too quickly and go, "Whoah, whoah, I'm going to pass out." The edges get dark and your world closes in, so you sit down again and recover. You're all light-headed and wondering if you dare try to continue.

So you do.

Then your head hangs on by a thread again. You cannot hold it up. And it hurts. So you lay down again. And the whole things starts all over again. 

Stand up nearly pass out, get to work, neck forces you down again. Stand up nearly pass out, get to work, neck forces you down again. And so on, over and over and over. And you go "Damnit, Janet, these cookies are taking all day!" 

So I call the grocery and schedule a delivery because I'm way too out of it to drive and do all that hard stuff like walk around throwing crap into a basket. And bringing it all upstairs.

My whole place is a total disaster area, like a tornado hit it. And I've still got things I must do.

It's times like this that require prioritization. 

And help.