Whenever we get around to it, we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Amish Sugar Cookies, a recipe that popped up in Nance’s Facebook sidebar; it was originally published on Taste of Home.

Robyn’s Take:

We’re baaaaaaaaaaack, bitches!

Well, kinda. We’ve only been talking about doing sporadic posts for about a year now. Finally, we got our asses in gear, and went for it. I don’t even remember the last tandem post we did. If only there was a way to find out. Unfortunately, no. I guess it’s going to remain a mystery FOREVER.

(One of my thousand and forty-eight peeves: when you post something and someone comes along and says “What’s a (whatever)?” WELL YOU ARE ON THE INTERNET MOTHERFUCKER, HOW’S ABOUT YOU LOOK IT UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP.)

Damn, two years. And that was the Pistachio Cake that I don’t even remember making. You guys have no idea how many times I’ve looked for a recipe here, stumbled across another one that we made, have ZERO recollection of ever making it, and I have to read the post to see if I liked it. On the other end of the spectrum, there are recipes like the McDonald’s Cheeseburger Casserole that we eat pretty regularly.

So anyway, we’re back. We’re planning, at this point, to do a post about once a month.

Since last Nance and I posted, Fred and I have lost a 5 cats (Corbie, Miz Poo, Sugarbutt, Tommy and Stinkerbelle – except for Miz Poo, their losses were completely unexpected), as well as our chicken guardian Gracie. 2015 was absolutely awful, to say the least.

We’re still fostering kittens. Currently, we have six kittens who are almost three months old. They’ve got the run of the house during the day, and if you ever wondered what it would be like to have your EVERY SINGLE MOVE judged and found wanting, let me tell you – it is alternately fun as hell and annoying as shit. If I need to get something out of the refrigerator, I have to sneak into the kitchen, grab what I need, and slam the door shut before the kittens figure out what’s going on. On the other end of the spectrum, I have kissed every one of those kittens at least 7,000 times, so it all works out.

Four of them are going to their homes on the 28th. Do you live in North Alabama? Want a couple of cuties? Chanandler Bong and Ken Adams are still available and need a home! This is what they look like. They are 63 times cuter in person. Chanandler’s the girl on the left, Ken’s the kitten with the Moe Howard hairdo on the right.

Okay, on to the recipe! Like I said up there, this recipe for Amish Sugar Cookies popped up on Facebook for Nance, and she asked if I wanted to give it a try. Of course I was willing, so here we are.

The ingredientses:

Softened butter, vegetable oil, sugar, confectioner’s sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, all-purpose flour, baking soda, and cream of tartar.

That picture reminds me – the other thing that has changed in the past couple of years is that we got new counters and a white cast-iron sink. The cheap white counters that were here when we bought the house always got on my nerves, but it took 8 years for me to get Fred on board with the idea of new counters. I like these counters better, though with them being so dark, it’s sometimes hard to tell when the ant infestation (which happens every spring) is happening.

Step one in making these cookies – put the butter and oil in your mixing bowl. Add your sugars.

Beat that shit together.

Toss in your eggs one at a time and beat until well blended. Action shot!

Combine your dry ingredients, then add them to the creamed mixture. You could do it gradually, but I like to like life to the fullest and just toss everything in there at once.

“BUT WAIT!” you are saying. “ROBYN, WAIT! How, oh HOW, do you stop the flour from flying all over the place? Do you buy one of those pouring shields? TELL ME YOUR SECRET, WISE ONE!”

To this I say, Yes. Yes, you could buy one of those pouring shields, and in fact I HAVE one of them. It works really well – however, it lives up in the cupboard behind a ton of crap, and it’s a huge pain to find and pull out. And then I have to wash it afterward! Instead of doing all that, what I do is wrap a dish towel around the bowl, like such:

It stops the flour from flying out of the bowl, any residual flour that lands on the dish towel can be shaken off, and then you’re good to go.

Now, listen. You strike me as a bit of a klutz, so it is POSSIBLE that you might accidentally hold the towel so that it gets mixed up with the beater and gets pulled into the bowl. I, myself, have never done that, but that’s because I am careful. So you be careful too – and don’t blame me if you fuck it all up. That’s on YOU.

Once everything’s mixed together, drop the dough onto your baking sheets in 1 teaspoon scoops, and bake ’til lightly browned.

I determined pretty quickly that if I made these cookies as small as the recipe called for I was going to be there all friggin’ day, so I did half the batch with my teaspoon sized scoop, and the other half with my tablespoon sized scoop. And yes, shut up, I DO have two instruments that are used solely for scooping cookie dough. What of it?

While the cookies baked and cooled, there was drama in the middle of the kitchen floor.

When there are kittens around, there’s always SO much drama. Stefan (the big lunk of orange there on the right) would love to play with the kittens. However, he has no idea that he’s six times bigger than they are, so he lunges at them like a puppy, and they react by hissing and falling backward out of their Chewy box. As you do. The drama queen in question this time around is Susie, who has been adopted and will be going home this weekend. God, I love a drama queen kitten.

“After all that drama, Chef Susie need a nap. You go ‘way and be quiet, now.”

So, the cookies.

The verdict? Meh. You’d think cookies containing that much butter, oil, and two different kinds of sugar would be irresistible. However, while they were kind of tasty – and I certainly ate plenty of them – I cannot ever imagine someone saying “Oh, bring those fabulous Amish Sugar Cookies to the party. They’re SO GOOD!” I’d eat them if they were in front of me, but I’d never ever request them, and I don’t plan to make them again. That said, Fred did suggest that I freeze the leftovers. Here in this house, we always have cookies in the freezer, usually my favorite Cannoli cookies. They’re the last-ditch “There is nothing sweet in this house, I NEED SOMETHING SWEET!” snack food. It takes about 6 months for us to eat a whole batch of cookies (it is really unusual for us not to have anything sweet in the house because we both have huge sweet tooths. Sweet teeth? You know what I mean.) I’ll be curious to see how long it takes us to get desperate enough to pull these cookies out of the freezer.

I liked the bigger cookies, because they were a little soft in the middle. Fred preferred the smaller ones, because they were firm all the way through. You do what you want; we won’t judge you.

I mean, obviously we WILL judge you, but you shouldn’t care what we think. You do you!

Nance’s Take:

What you’ve missed since we’ve been gone…

Sadly, we lost The Beagle, Sadie and Waldo in the past 12 months.  

My son, Alex, got married and we did the entire wedding at our house.  Robyn came up to help (she was an invited guest, but I put her ass to work in the kitchen) so she was able to see firsthand the insanity that is a Western Pennsylvania wedding (major amounts of real food along with a Pittsburgh cookie table, popcorn, and a nacho bar).  Since we were on a tight budget a lot of the food was made in-house and it took a lot of hands to make it happen.  Which is probably why it’s been so long since we got back to DCEP.  That wedding really took it out of us!

I came across this recipe on my Facebook wall and asked Robyn if she would be interested in doing it for DCEP. She stupidly agreed so here we are!

When Julie comes around it involves 1 of 3 things…butter, frosting or Doritos®.  Today’s main ingredient was butter and she is all about that shit!

After making all kinds of fancy cookies for the wedding I completely lost interest in cookies (Christmas was a bummer this year because we were so not into baking).  This recipe caught my eye because it was plain.  Sometimes I like a plain, simple cookie.  Nothing fancy, no fillings, no frostings, no chocolate chips.  And I love an Amish sugar cookie.

In late October we welcomed a puppy into our lives.  Her name is Krissie and she’s an English Mastiff.  Which means she’s going to be really big.

She currently weighs 102 lbs at 8 months old.  She will definitely be an official taster for DCEP because she loves food. And this is where I recommend to everyone that they not purchase a dark brown rug for the kitchen hallway.  What a pain in the ass it is to keep clean!

I don’t know that much about Amish people, but I’m pretty sure that they don’t use vegetable oil in their cookies. Unless you pretend that melted lard is vegetable oil. I’m gonna go ahead and call bullshit on this being an actual Amish recipe.  I wonder how the Amish make powder sugar.  If anybody knows, pop the answer in the comment section.

I am so fancy that I get my vanilla from Mexico. Or I’m not that fancy and I just happen to love Mexican vanilla. It all started when Rick had to go there for work and brought me a bottle back.  This last bottle came from when the kids had their honeymoon in Mexico. I love Mexican vanilla.

I love it so much that I got a tattoo of the Mexican orchid on my arm (with a couple of helpful reminder words for this ADD brain of mine). Now that’s called dedication!  

Here’s my perfectly shaped cookie dough that I got by using my fancypants cookie scoop.  I made the wise decision to buy commercial baking sheets a while back and I have yet to regret it.  I use these things for everything (baking chicken, cookies, etc.) and they really take a beating.

Amish cookies served on Polish pottery.  There’s a joke in there somewhere, but I wasn’t finding it.

These cookies got a lot of rave reviews on the web site.

Krissie gave the cookies two paws up, but I was not impressed.  They kind of tasted too flour-y for me to really enjoy.  I’m going to stick with my old sugar cookie recipe that takes sour cream since I know that one turns out every time.