Halloween more than any other holiday is a “pot luck” holiday to me.

This year rather than just do something store bought I thought I’d go all out and MAKE something.  While I’m actually a pretty good cook, I’m a lousy baker, but I put that aside and decided to try my hand at making some cookies.  I found some really clever Thriller style dancin’ zombie cookie cutters and thought I’d make a nice Halloween zombie horde.

Knowing my limitations I decided against making dough from scratch and bought some tubes of sugar cookie dough.  I rolled it out and following the instructions got it to a certain thickness before applying the cutters.  As soon as I removed the cutter, however, the cookie fell to pieces.  I determined the dough to be too thin and re-rolled it a bit thicker.  I applied the cutter again, and upon removing it only the head and arms and legs stuck this time, leaving just a zombie torso.  .  While dismembered would be in-theme, it seemed like too much of a mess up again and I decided to scrap those too.

At this point the dough started to get sticky so I re-floured it and put it in the fridge.  After letting it chill I re-rolled it thicker and tried the cutters again.  This time when I took the cookie cutter off the arms and legs stretched WAY out making an octopus-armed zombie.  At this point I started to get angry.  Like REALLY angry.

I re-rolled the whole batch SUPER thick and used the cutters finally having cookies survive the process:

I didn’t have a cookie sheet so I put six of them on a pizza pan, put them in the oven to cook, and continued to cut the rest of the dough, making 30-40 dancin’ zombies.

When the timer went off and opened the oven and found the six zombie cookies I was baking had merged into one GIANT cookie on the pan.  Apparently cutting them thick enough to survive the cutters meant they were so thick they swelled and spread out while cooking!

They shattered into a mess when I took them off the pan and I tried to make only twoto see if they’d just swell without merging into a zombie-cookie-blob form.  It made this:

 

 

Finally furious beyond imagining I yelled “F*CK THIS!” wadded the rest up into a bowl and bought some friggin cookies at the store on the way in the next morning.

Though admittedly the pics of my baking failure and the story was a bigger hit at the pot luck than any dessert I could’ve made.

Here’s hoping if anyone has to do any baking for the rest of the holiday season it goes better than my experiment and failing that you at least get as good a story out of it…