"Homemade" Butter Cookies

Meet the "easy-to-use battery powered cookie press that makes cookie-making fast and fun!" The box boasts, in best TV infomercial syntax, that it is "the only cookie press with 2 interchangeable barrels for making traditional OR jumbo cookies!" Its other selling points include "one-handed battery operation"--as if there are all kinds of things we might profitably be doing with that other hand while making cookies. It runs on two C batteries, which are, inevitably, not included. And the little grinding sound it makes as it extrudes each cookie is almost endearing.

The Mom purchased this monstrosity last year in a fit of post-Christmas madness. And she insisted that we were not leaving the Outer Banks until we had tried it. So today we made dozens of awful, tasteless little butter cookie turds. Crunchy, flavorless, terrible. The chocolate version was marginally better, if only because we tripled the recommended amount of cocoa.

I will say one thing for the "Battery Powered BonJour Cookie Factory and Decorating Kit": The cookies did look gratifyingly like the pictures on the box. But at what cost? We should have known better than to make to recipe from the package insert of this diabolical device. Lesson learned.