Sugar Cookies With Royal Icing Recipe

I am not a baker.  Well, not a very good one, anyway.

I like baking.  I like folding egg whites and measuring sugar and the smell the house has when there are cookies in the oven.  Sadly, though, I am usually disappointed with the sum of my efforts, since over and over again I withdraw from the oven a rotating lineup of deflated soufflés and busted-looking cakes.

Yet, even knowing my limitations, when my childhood best friend turned 30 a couple of weeks ago, I got the grand idea to bake her sailboat-shaped sugar cookies then decided to up the ante by decorating them with royal icing, something I hadn’t done since culinary school.  Royal icing is no joke, in case you were wondering.  It’s fussy, and takes skillz that I do not claim to possess.

It took me about fifteen tries to get a cookie that looked halfway decent. Royal icing is not my forte.

I had this weird little freak-out over her turning the big 3-0.  I don’t know why – I barely batted an eyelash with the Big Man turned 30, just gave him a surprise party and a nasty hangover and teased him for getting old.  But something about one of my oldest friends turning 30 just, I don’t know, blew my mind.  We’ve now been friends longer than we’ve not been friends, if that makes sense.  It’s crazy.

But if I’ve learned anything from the millions of late-night conversations with her over the past over-15 (gasp!) years, it’s that sometimes life hands you a day where all you need to do it stop, laugh, and sit down on a porch somewhere and enjoy a really good micro-brew.  And that it’s a pretty good thing when you have a friend who rolls with your punches and loves you no matter what, so that even when you send her the most ugly-ass cookies that you have ever made but spent all fricking day on, cookies that the post office was late delivering so they showed up a little stale and kind of broken, she’ll understand where the hell you were going with that and even tell you they were delicious.

Because while I’m not a great baker, sometimes it’s the flavor that’s important and not the looks.

(At least, that’s what I tell myself when I oversleep and race to work looking like a hot mess with crazygirl hair and yesterday’s shirt thrown back on.)

And I can have as many little freak-outs as I like, but at the end of the day, when my life has an oven and good friends and free wifi— baking ugly-ass cookies is a pretty good thing.