Butter cookie FAIL: "tastes just like butter" is not as delectable as it sounds.

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My consolation prize: delicious oaty raspberry bars.

It all seemed so simple.  Make this recipe from Smitten Kitchen, refrigerate the dough, then slice an bake, just like I did every weekend in college (with pillsbury, not pot, people)!  I even felt secure enough to be a little bit adventurous and divide the dough into 2 before adding the different flavors, thus creating more dishes (and work) for myself.  But hey, I thought, what's another dish or six when this recipe looks so simple?

Ok, maybe I'm not being fair to the recipe.  It does seem simple.  And I'm willing to bet that the cookies, if correctly constructed, do come out as delicious as Deb says.  I mean, the dough was certainly tasty, and looked about right too:

 

 

 

And once I'd added the lemon zest/juice and chocolate chips to their respective doughs, they even rolled up pretty well, if a bit stickily:

 

But then.  Halfway through the chill time.  I realized... I used the wrong scoop and only put half the required amount of flour!  GAH.  I whipped open the fridge door and squeezed the dough logs (ew, that sounds dirty); the chocolate chip one seemed nice and solid, but the lemon one, due I suspect mostly to the juice, was squidgy.  So, rather than just toss it, I decided to try to salvage it.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to mix 3/4 of a cup of flour into a log of basically just butter that's been in the fridge for 2 hours?

 

Yeah.  Not easy.  And yes, gross looking.  But I got the job done, rewrapped the new log, and stuck it back in the fridge.

And from there, things seemed to get better.  When I pulled the dough out and sliced it, the only difficulty was the rock-hardness of the little chocolate chips.  But I still got them all sliced and placed on the parchment, looking organized and ready to be made delicious:

 

  

And when they were baking, they smelled promising... But when they came out, the parchment was soaked in butter and the cookies were, well, spread thin:

 

 

I still held out a teeny tiny bit of hope, but when I bit into one all I could taste was butter.  Of course I lost it, just a little.  I didn't cry, but I did want to throw the tray across the kitchen.  Not because I'd messed up or they weren't good, but because I had made such a mess in my efforts to fix the problem, and they still turned out kind of yucky.  

I say 'kind of' because, although I didn't eat any past my samples, the bf liked them enough to snack on them for a few days.  He might even have finished them if I'd made fewer (we had like 60 of these little butter frisbees).  In fact, when I whipped up some scrumptious raspberry oat bars from this allrecipes.com lifesaver (I used almonds instead of walnuts) later that day, he scorned them for the failcookies!  I was shocked.  Even with my mouth full of raspberry jam.

But I guess it just goes to show that we all have different tastes.  Or some boyfriends are just loving (and eventually stubborn) enough to eat their girlfriends' disgusting attempts at slice and bake cookies.  Either way, I think I'll be sticking to Pillsbury on this one.