Monday Mom Cookies

I’ve been super busy over the past few weeks doing stuff for other people. Today for the first time in maybe all of March, I don’t have to be anywhere while the kids are in school. So while I’m playing catchup on the past few weeks of house cleaning, laundry, bills, mail, and email, I decided to take a break and spend a little time doing something as a treat for myself.

This is one way I differ from other folks, a normal treat is probably getting a manicure, haircut, shopping, coffee with a friend, or watching a TV show. My treat was looking through my fabric stash for a few minutes, and then trying out an iced oatmeal cookie recipe.

I used to really enjoy Archway Iced Oatmeal Cookies. Also the Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pies. I’ve wanted to try to make both of those homemade for years and sometimes research recipes for them online for fun. However, the folks in my house aren’t at all into those sorts of cookies. And since I usually have to try a few recipes or monkey with a recipe a few times before settling on one or getting it the way I like it, without an open audience, it seemed like there would be a lot of extra cookies. The recipes for these sorts of oatmeal cookies also include pulsing the oats in a food processor then using a mixer, which seems like lots of dishes and up and down the basement stairs where extra kitchen stuff is stored. So I’ve never tried these.

Today, I was up for treating myself, and extra dishes and basement stairs. I wanted to take the alone time for baking and make something that is just for me.

But the recipe didn’t work. My cookies turned out “fine” but not right and definitely not like the Archway ones, which the recipe advertised. The cookies didn’t all spread, and the cookies that did spread, wanted to fall apart getting glazed. And the glaze wanted to suction in all of the cookies, and I decided to not let it most of the excess glaze to drip off (more frosting, yum), but it was the last 2 cups of powdered sugar in the house, and not letting a bunch drip off, I ran out of glaze before the end. Then turns out I didn’t really like the glaze on the cookies (needed a little melted butter or vanilla or both, too much cornstarch taste from the powdered sugar).

The cookie flavor was okay. Maybe too much nutmeg, the finished product tasted a little like soap to me. It also turned out that I liked the thicker cookies than the ones that flattened as they were supposed to anyway. I also spilled two bins of my fabric stash – the only two that were actually folded nicely and were sorted by color.

I was thinking about these cookies and fabric heap and life as “Mom,” part in an exasperated “oh, come on” way, and part in an “yep, that’s the way it goes” way. The way a kid is typically sick on Mom’s birthday or the way Mom ends up with the cookies that ran out of glaze (or even the ones with the glaze already licked off!). Not so much in a pessimistic way though.

While I’d appreciate things working out my way, I am a full time mom with young kids. Maintaining healthy happy kids and keeping them feeling safe is my job requirement and getting to choose the pizza topping, or having the cookie I dreamed of are not in the job benefits these days. And that’s not AT ALL a bad thing. So for the rest of the day, I’m turning back to my job focus… washing sheets, mopping floors, prepping pretzel dogs for early pre-soccer practice dinner, searching for missing library books. And maybe I’ll  add Little Debbies to my grocery list.