Finding Joy in Snarkville

A short essay, by the Queen.

I’m sure that this title alone will triple my search results, but still it is true, Martha Stewart is the bane of the existance to all woman, wives and mothers especially.

As a former subscriber to Martha Stewart Living and a believer in the “Martha Way,” I feel uniquely qualified to declare it all crap.

You see at one point in my life I dreamed in shades of sage green and white.  I saw racks of pans in my kitchen with purposes for each.  I made meals daily that were as pleasing to the eye as to the mouth.  But what I REALLY dreamed of was the cookies!

You know what cookies I’m talking about.  The carefully cut sugar cookies with a thin perfectly outlined royal icing line that were then “flooded” with color.

Oh, yes, THOSE.  I thought for YEARS “how hard could they be?”  Yup, THAT hard.

First, there is the cookie dough.  Must be homemade because frankly the dough in the fridge doesn’t hold up well enough to being rolled out and cut into shapes — let’s not review the Christmas cookie fun — where the Queen Mum and I were forced to call the expert in sugar cookies, The Queen Aunt.  So, I already knew to find a good stiff cookie dough recipe.

Done.  That wasn’t too hard and I like any recipe that calls for a break about 1/2 way through.  Cookies baked, oh, except I kind of hate my oven and had to babysit it to make sure we got done cookies and not crackers.

Then there was the icing.  Now, the “Martha Way” is to make two batches of each color.  One ’stiff’ batch for outlining and one ‘flood’ batch that is slightly runny for filling in.  I’m lazy and have no idea the difference, so I make a batch to test drive.

I made PERFECT flood icing.  Thinking I’d done a ’stiff’ batch, I put it in the pastry bag and began piping.  I had runny mess!  Oh boy.

Next up, try again.  This time I make icing the rough consistancy of concrete, dry, cracked, OLD concrete.  Oh yes — this is the RIGHT stuff for the outlining.  Yeah.  Except, again, I’m lazy and decide this stuff is a PAIN to pipe, so I’m not bothering to do different colors it will be white and red, period, the end, that’s it.

Except THEN I realize I need to fill in.  So, lazy kicks in again, and thinks, you can just pipe this concrete in and flaten it with the knife.  Note to all you out there, DO NOT TRY this.  First, you will build a bicep the size of a small child in ONE cookie.  Second, you will HATE the result.

So I try the last thing, I attempt to add milk TO the already set-up pastry bag (please see the point where I declare I’m lazy, see also, I have a life and wish to get out of the kitchen already and return to the land of the living and less sticky).  This DOES not work as planned.  It does however work to spoon the now perfect ‘flood’ icing out of the top of the bag and smooth it over — if you ignore a few splashes.

I declare myself done.  I declare the Martha Standard to be dead to me from this point forward.  I will no longer aspire to be a domestic goddess.  I will no longer aspire to make pretty cookies (but what they lack in pretty, they make up for in YUMMY).  I will pick role models who can accomplish what they tout without a staff of thousands.  I will forever believe that she is secretly laughing at any woman who so much as tries any of her recipes, crafts, or “good things” — and you can not convince me as I sit here rubbing my sore bicep, dreading the sugar coated kitchen clean-up I have facing me, that Marth Stewart, herself, doesn’t hate me just a little.

Oh, and I resolve to not eat anymore of my mistakes, because I won’t have any to share if I do.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 19th, 2007 at 10:37 pm and is filed under The Queen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.