Saturday, December 13, 2008

Whatever Martha!

Have any of you seen the new show hosted by Martha Stewart's daughter, Alexis, and her friend, Jennifer? It's called "Whatever Martha". The basic premise of the show is this; they watch old clips of the Martha Stewart show and joke around about how unrealistic her various crafts/ recipes are. I could totally be another of the hosts of the show because I've never been a big Martha fan. I mean seriously, when the recipe calls for the finest Madagascar cheese cloth to strain the Veuve Clicot champagne infused sheep's brain you're a little out there. So this brings us to last week when YaYa Kimberly calls me and invites me to make Christmas cookies. She was so inspired by the latest issue of MS Living and heck, it's Christmas. Time to do some baking. So YaYa Stacie and I went over to Kimberly's house for a Christmas cookie baking extravaganza.

Kimberly and Stacie had both already made some cookie dough. All we had to do was get the cookie cutters, bake, and decorate. Easy right? I mean just a few simple steps and we would have edible works of art ala Martha. Well, they are definitely edible. Works of art? I'll let you be the judge. Here are some of the cookies before baking. They look okay, right?


Here are some of the finished products...not too shabby, but not quite up to Martha standards I would guess.





Now these next cookies are straight out of the magazine, and they are absolutly precious! It's just 2 Nilla Waffers for the bun, 1 grasshopper cookie for the meat, red/ yellow icing for the ketchup and mustard, and sesame seeds on top for an even more realistic look. Aren't they too cute? Kimberly whipped out a dozen of these in no time at all.


As you might imagine, a teeny tiny bit of cookie consumption was going on through all of this decorating. I think we might have had just a bit of a sugar high going. We started having a little more fun with our creations....

To further illustrate the crazed sugar high concept, here is exhibit B. Why yes, that is me, holding a lovely little cookie. What is that cookie you ask???

Well, it's a traditional Christmas outhouse cookie of course! I'm not sure I can even remember how this whole outhouse topic came up, but I think it went something like this. Stacie brought a gazillion cookie cutters to use. Some of my favs were the little bitty stars. Stacie cut out a teeny star out of some dough, and commented that it looked like the star/ moon cut out in an outhouse door. Being in my sugar induced haze, I thought, "an outhouse, yes, that's what I'll make next". So with no cookie cutter, or pattern; nothing but my own brilliance I made this super fab outhouse cookie. Take that Martha!

Debbie, I know you're traumatized already reading this, so you'd better cover your eyes and scroll down. After I had crafted this work of art, I thought that it still needed something. I thought perhaps it needed some words above the door. When I asked what I should write up there, without missing a beat, Kimberly suggested "Sh*t happens". So, thus it came to be. My little Christmas sh*t house. My mother must be so proud of me...

By this time, the sugar was REALLY kicking in. We even made a little Christmas vignette.
We weren't sure if these guys were rejects from a Dutch boy band, or what. We named them Hansel and Grendel (no, not Gretel, he's a boy! He's named after the character in Beowulf). There was a minute there in my sugar induced state of euphoria that I was afraid they'd break out singing "Macho, macho man..." ala The Village People.



I thought perhaps my readers could create a little story. You could just add on to the story in the comments. Here, I'll start. Once upon a time, there were two young boys named Hansel and Grendel. Grendel had grown very tired of his life as a back-up clog dancer for Abba. One day, he convinced Hansel to take a trip out into the lovely Dutch country side....




So, if you've made it this far through the post, you should probably reward yourself with a fresh, homemade cookie. Just remember, friends don't let friends create on a sugar high!
Have a great week!

8 comments:

Denise Felton said...

OMG! I'm still snort laughing. What a wonderful way to get into the Christmas spirit. Y'all SO rock!

ScrapbookDBA said...

Once upon a time, there were two young boys named Hansel and Grendel. Grendel had grown very tired of his life as a back-up clog dancer for Abba. One day, he convinced Hansel to take a trip out into the lovely Dutch country side....

but to get to the lovely Dutch country side ... the boys (or young men should I say ...) had to trek through the evil, scary, wicked .. butterfly forest ... normally one would ever think of butterflies as evil or wicked .. but here deep in the forest were monsterous butterflies would were 10 times as big as Grendel and Hansel .... they were only a few steps into the forest when ....

Janna said...

an evil tulip farmer kidnapped them and forced them to do hard farm labor in exchange for mere crumbs of food each day. They had to dig up bulbs and replant bulbs in extravagant patterns that could only be found in a certain US based magazine - Martha Stewart Living. They came to curse the name Martha and spit upon anyone who dared utter her name. In addition to all the digging, they regularly had to fend off attacks from the evit butterflies which were attracted to the brightly colored tulips.......

Janna said...

(love the outhouse cookie, by the way. This post needed a spew alert!!)

Debbie Nelson said...

when the evil butterflies came upon the beautiful tulips, the tulips screamed "We are having a Martha moment, we can make beautiful things out of the most evil ugliest things." At that moment,the ugly wicked butterflies were transformed into csterpillars. After forty days and forty nights, Hansel and Grendel watched in amazement as the caterpillars turned into the most beautiful, sweet and caring butterflies you could imagine.Hansel and Gredel found themselves in the midst of the most beautiful garden you could imagine...filled with a variety of sixty-five roses, violets, daffodils and the tallest sunflowers they had ever seen. Hansel and Grendel feasted on Martha's most special recipes and the once evil butterlies flitted about doing good deeds.....

Debbie Nelson said...

Lisa, I am so sorry I had to miss such a wonderful day of cookie making. I love all the creations..the out house cookie is hysterical...you know me and my burgers...those adorable..yummy!

Anne said...

you guys are cracking me up!!! I suppose after eating a cookie hamburger, the cookie snowman would visit the cookie outhouse...

Audra said...

wow...you guys look like you were having so much fun...all you needed was some of my barely edible popcorn balls I made for Josh. hahaha!