One Martha A Day: Day Thirty Eight: Puzzling Cookie

We are celebrating a little boy's birthday tomorrow. This little boy is the son of a very good friend. He is turning four and his mother has asked that in lieu of toys, we bring one kids book that will be donated to the childrens' hospital. It is such a sweet gesture and one that we should all emulate...But I sort of feel bad for the little boy: what four-year old understands philanthropy? Poor kid is probably coming to his birthday expecting a toy-a-palooza and he's getting...books.

Books that he's going to donate.

So I'm not buying a gift for him. I'm following directions...but I am going to make a gift, which was not mentioned at all by his mother. (If you are reading this, please forgive me, B.) The lawyer in me says that if it was not explicitly excluded, it's an exception.

Gift-giving being rationalized, I'm off to buy the ingredients....

I'm going to make Martha's Cookie Puzzle, which in addition to being edible is also educational (you have to solve the puzzle), so it's not all bad, right? (This is where the readers are supposed to agree.)

I happen to know that this special boy is crazy about dinosaurs, so I decided to theme my cookie puzzle on dinosaurs. I baked the (really large) cookie and divided it per Martha's instructions.

Then, I put a background of white icing:

Since I have a dinosaur-loving son of my own, I have to admit that I am pretty good at drawing dinosaurs. Many an afternoon have I sat with a kid on my lap drawing the things. So it was with some surprise that my dinosaur turned out like this:

Not fantastic. It looks like someone hemorrhaged on the cookie. You can hardly tell it's a dinosaur. I thought about including a note explaining it was a dinosaur, but figured if I had to do that, then the dinosaur must really stink.

And when I tried to make it better by outlining it and drawing in some details, it only got worse:

A photo of the handsome face:

And the tail, complete with spikes:

At this point, I'm pretty sure Someone is trying to teach me a lesson. (Next time, I won't try to be clever, I promise. I will follow all gift-giving directions, explicit or implied.)

But now, I have a gift that needs a-fixin'.

I decided to abandon the dinosaur shape (a stegosaurus for those of you who were wondering) and just draw the number four. That's easy. Never mind that the sugar cookie now has approximately seven inches of icing on it. Kids like icing.

With the number four:

Ever wish you had an "undo" button for your life? That's how I feel about this cookie. I'd like to start at the beginning. Right about at photo #1.

This is the finished product:

I sort of swirled all the icing together to make an abstract image. The puzzle is really more about shapes, than a specific image, anyway.

You might notice how this cookie is substantially smaller than it was originally. That is because during the process, the bottom part of the cookie cracked. So, I abandoned it. There was also a large mouth-shaped bite out of another piece. I'm still not sure who is the culprit. But a smaller cookie is actually better. We wouldn't want to give the birthday boy a a tummy ache.