Despite what it looks like, this is NOT a bowl full of dog poop. It is actually gingerbread dough in the process of being mixed. I had already folded in the one large egg, and already stirred it almost to readiness for the kneading process.
You see, my daughter and I have been staying at home in Texas while my wife and son are off on a trip I couldn’t manage for health reasons. So, since the Princess and I have some bonding time, we decided to have a gingerbread cookie contest that we ended up putting off too long last December.
We decided to make just two cookies. I suggested unicorns, she wanted to do a dragon. So we each took half of the dough and started sculpting. We didn’t make the cookies mobile once cooked. The plan was to make them, decorate them, photograph them, and eat them.
The Dragon is the Princess’s entry and the unicorn mine in the fantasy critter cookie contest. In the previous pictures they are in raw dough form. In the next set of pictures they are cooked cookies.
The en-fattened cooked cookies didn’t look quite as fine as our original sculpted conceptions. We were hoping to improve their artistic merits by decorating them. I had frosting left over from the gingerbread house we did in December.
The chocolate frosting, though, had congealed in a strange, barely spreadable manner. To deal with this, had to warm it and melt it slightly to get it to spread. The Princess chose to forego using chocolate frosting. Like an idiot, I forged ahead with the tasty goo.
Unfortunately, the warm chocolate had a tendency to melt all the other decorative frosting.
So, I tried my best to be artsy creative and rescue the look of my unicorn cookie. I failed. I turned it into a fire-tailed ugly dog with a bleeding white stick stuck in its forehead.
The Princess was, however, much more successful.
And fortunately, both cookies were delicious when it came time to clean up our respective messes.
True Treasures Take Time
I now have six good books and one embarrassing one published. They represent stories I have been crafting, revising, telling, and retelling for over 40 years. They represent things that happened to me in real life and people I have known and loved in real life that have all been transformed in the wizard’s crucible and witch’s cauldrons of my bizarre imagination. They contain some of my best magic spells and some of my most worthwhile wordsmithing, by which I mean writing in ways that give the spellchecker fits.
I tried to tell you this story about telling stories yesterday, but my computer glitched and burped and spontaneously deleted more than half of what I wrote just as I was finishing it to publish it. So the complex part I had planned to explain this Paffooney was lost and the resulting tantrum I threw kept me from remembering and rewriting.
But it was fortunate that I delayed the repair of this post until today. Because last night my daughter finished her end-of-the-year art project for school, and the snafu-demons have inadvertently given me the opportunity to include it here.
It is a soft sculpture dragon made of felt and hand-sewn. She didn’t tell me what his name is, or even that it is a him, but one can imagine that it must be something like Rumple-Tum Sneezer, or something equally awkwardly foolish like that. One can imagine it because one has a slightly off-kilter and Disney-demented imagination. But the whole project took a boatload of time, and you can see she crafted it with great care and skill.
Treasure takes time to create. We who attempt to create it in the red-hot forges of our stupid little creative heads put all the skill we have acquired over time into it. And the endeavor renders something of value almost every time. Time… time… time… Treasure takes time. And now I need to hurry and publish this before the computer tries to fart it all away again.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, Celebration, commentary, daughters, humor, imagination, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life