I fail at life. Or maybe just at making cookies. Or maybe it's the oven's fault...

Abstract:
I spent the whole day trying to make cookies and feeling like a failure. Read at your own risk because it might just make you feel as depressed as I do

I can't remember anything that I did today given my recent failures. I think that I spent the entire day trying to make Christmas cookies. I talked to my mom to figure out what I might have done wrong yesterday. We thought that maybe it was that I was using metric cups etc instead of US cups. We spent a good while trying to find a good recipe online that was in metric cups. That proved challenging. While US recipes are always in cups/tablespoons/teaspoons, the Australian recipes went back and forth between metric cups, mL, and grams. To make it even more confusing, they didn't say it was metric cups and an Aussie tablespoon is actually a different amount of mL than other metric tablespoons. Also, I had no way of measuring grams since I don't have a scale.  Instead, I had to figure out how to convert between mL and grams from one of the recipes that listed both for flour and sugar and then adjust it to the amount of grams in the recipe that I wanted to use. It was a mess.

Then I had to go to the store to get more butter and flour. I wanted to get enough to make two batches, one to experiment and then one using the successful cooking technique, and I had enough of everything else. The recipe called for a lot of butter. Since the butter comes in 250g packets and I needed 450 for each batch, I had to get four. I got 1 kg of butter and 1 kg of flour. That's it. Perfectly normal, right?

I made the dough and it turned out much better than the crumbly stuff that I had yesterday. That was a mess, but this dough looked good. Then I put it in the fridge to cool because that's one of the things that I was meant to do, but didn't know before.

While that was in the fridge, I ate lunch. I ate some reheated bites and I made a strawberry kiwi slushy. It was delicious. After lunch, I talked to Rohan. I'm going to EPIC tomorrow to hang out with him during his lunch and free time and then go to the church service thingy at night. We don't have Crossroads in the City this week because of NTE and the service is free on Sunday night, so we're supposed to go to that. I just need to get a reply back from Owen that he was able to get someone to give me a ride home. The buses don't run that late. Otherwise I'll just have to leave before the service so I can catch a bus.

I took a nap and then I was going to make my cookies. Well, the dough got a little too chilled. They dough was way too hard for me to try to do anything with. I had to wait a while to work with it, but I needed to do dishes anyway.

Then the fun part came. I could not for the life of me make cookies. I tried various things and I always had the same problem as yesterday. I tried to flip the pan over, but it wouldn't fit. I just decided to try to cook them on the rack but place baking paper down first so they didn't fall through and I could just lift them up. I tried chilling the dough. I tried shaping the dough and then chilling it again so that it was hard again. Then I realised that the bottoms are never done so I tried to use aluminium foil instead of the baking paper. I burnt the first batch because I got distracted talking to my mom. Then the second batch had the same problems as before.

I figured that it was just the type of oven that I have. My mom reminded me that we have a full size oven downstairs, but it was too late, so I couldn't go down there. I didn't know what to do with the rest of my dough. I'm going to be gone tomorrow, so I couldn't even just cook it then. She told me to just try cooking it in my pan, without the foil or paper. The reason that I hadn't tried this before was that I couldn't just use a spatula to get the cookies out because of the sides. Well, what do you know, a few of those cookies actually look like they turned out! How incredibly frustrating! After hours upon hours of making these stupid cookies, I think I may have found out how to cook them. On a side note, though, I found online that you need to use a bundt pan if you want to make a cake, so that's probably why my cinnamon roll cake was such a disaster in the middle.

So now I'm exhausted and overly frustrated and I feel like a failure. I really just want to get to bed and forget about this whole cookie fiasco!