Tough cookies

Despite my best efforts, I am not a pastry chef.  My problem is that I think too highly of myself and my abilities.  I follow The Pioneer Woman's blog and I LOVE it when she posts food entries.  Partly because I love to clean drool off of my keyboard because the pictures she posts along with the recipies are to die for and partly because I want so desperately to be the mom that makes the best cookies and all of my kids' friends want to come over after school because I make the best lasagna and they are hoping there are leftovers in the fridge. 

::sigh::

Don't get me wrong.  My family is not starving because of my lack of cooking ability and I do have a few strong dishes that are my go-to meals.  For example, I make a mean lasagna.  I don't even like lasagna and I like mine.  Another one?  Stuffed pork chops.  Oh.  Em.  Gee.  The stuffed pork chops deserve another post entirely.  However.  Greg and I were flipping through my Betty Crocker cookbook a few weeks back and he was happily flagging all of the dishes that he thought he would like to try and one of them was Apple Crisp.  Sounds easy enough, right?  Well, I made it this weekend and there were several problems.  A few examples: there was too high of an apple:crisp ratio, it wasn't sweet enough and it wasn't "syrup-ey" enough.  Hmmm, not exactly the most constructive criticism, but I may have found another version of it that I will try so I may be able to redeem myself.

Now for the real heartbreaker.  Last week on The Pioneer Woman's blog, she posted a recipie for petite vanilla bean scones.  I'm warning you now, if you click on that link, you may think you've died and gone to heaven.  You have not.  But I'm pretty sure that they will be serving these tasty little treats up there as an appetizer at a new-arrivals mixer.  Where was I going with this . . . oh yeah how my inadequacies continue to stack up when I visit The Pioneer Woman's website.  So I got the hairbrained idea that I was going to make these sweet little things this weekend.  I even bought vanilla beans (which I was afraid I was going to have to go to a specialty store and pay something like $4/bean, but I actually found them at Hy-Vee and they were only about $1/bean).  I got all of my ingredients together, I painstakingly scraped out the cavier from the vanilla bean, I made sure I had enough counter space to roll out the dough.

A very important fact to remember about scones is that they require lots of flour.  Not to be mixed into the dough but because mine were VERY sticky and I didn't use enough flour on the countertop and the dough stuck to that.  It also stuck to the rolling pin.  I thought I was going to make it through without too many tears and then?  Then, I began to peel up the beautiful petite triangles.  And those sweet little triangles that I had hoped would win me a Mother of the Year award began to fall apart.  And I don't mean a little stretching of the dough here and there.  There was more dough left on the counter and stuck to my floor than there was actually in the oven.  Also?  Scones are supposed to be thick.  Mine were thin like sugar cookies.

Once I got the scones out of the oven, the directions said to let them cool completely before glazing them.  This part I actually accomplished.  The letting them cool part.  Not the glazing part.  That part comes next.  I mixed up the glaze, dunked the scones and set them on the drying racks to dry.  I even remembered to put a cookie sheet under them so the glaze wouldn't drip all over the countertop.  About an hour later, I checked them and the glaze was still a little tacky so I had the brilliant idea to let them sit overnight.  As it turns out, when a pastry that is glazed is left sitting out overnight it turns into a brick.  A brick that is now glued to my drying racks. 

I guess my kids' friends will have to make do with lasagna and stuffed pork chops because I may never get the hang of pastries from scratch.  But I will continue to try and subject my family to eating my kitchen experiments!