UT Graduation Part I: Hook 'Em and Ice 'Em

We just had an exhausting weekend in Austin...so exhausting that our kids slept in until 9:15-9:45am the morning after we got back home. What a tiring, but fun weekend! Since one post about our trip would be too long for anyone to sit through, I'm going to break it up into 2 posts. This post will be about the infamous cookies. The next post will be about our actual activities.

J graduated from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin on Saturday. At J's request, I made longhorn cookies for the graduation dinner. There's some background info that non-Texans need to know. 1. The UT mascot is Bevo, a Texas longhorn. A longhorn is basically a breed of cattle that has very long horns. 2. Everyone knows this UT hand signal that looks like sign language for "I love you." Well, that hand signal is known as the "Hook 'Em Horns" sign in UT-land. So when you see people doing that in all my pictures, that's what they are doing. They aren't all lovey-dovey.

Anyway, these cookies caused me trouble from the get-go. First, I had to run to the Guenther House just to get the longhorn-shaped cookie cutter. It pained me to go to that restaurant to buy a cookie cutter and not get to enjoy some yummy breakfast. Grrrrr. Then I had to find a cookie carrier to transport these delicate cookies. I ended up borrowing a cupcake carrier from a friend and buying another one since I knew I would have a lot of cookies.

I was up until 12:40am on Thursday night making these cookies! I made the America's Test Kitchen holiday cookie recipe, which I've made 2 times before, but I guess I forgot how long it would take. This recipe is delicious and makes the perfect dough for cookie cutting, but it takes FOREVER because you have to keep chilling the dough--after you make the dough and then after you roll it out between parchment paper. So I was in the kitchen for at least 3 hours slaving away.

I didn't have time to ice the cookies Thursday night, so I figured I would ice them on Friday morning before we headed up to Austin. Half of our stuff was already packed, so I felt like I could handle that. Boy, was I wrong! For those of you who know me well, I was stressed out the morning we had to leave. Imagine that! We had to finish getting all the kids' stuff together, pack up snacks, get the kids ready, make the cookie glaze the right UT burnt orange color, and still ice the cookies. The thing is, once you iced the cookies, they still needed 30 minutes to dry before you could transport them! I knew I couldn't accomplish all this, so I decided to ice them in Austin before the dinner.

After we ate lunch in Austin, we checked into the hotel and let Eli take a much-needed nap. While he napped, I just sat there and iced the cookies for an hour. I have a new-found appreciation for iced cookies in bakeries. It took me awhile to ice them all, but it was actually kind of relaxing....sitting there quietly "painting" my cookies. Although Elina just sat next to me and kept asking, "When can I eat the cookies? Can I eat them now?" Unfortunately for me (but fortunately for Elina), we had a few casualties during transport and 2 of my longhorns ended up with broken horns, so I let Elina munch on those cookies.

I'm telling you, these cookies were just trouble! But in the end, everyone was impressed with how they turned out. When we took them into the restaurant, some people saw the cookies and they told their family and friends about them. My dad joked that I could probably make some money selling them on campus. So in the end it was well worth it since they brought a smile to everyone's face. But I definitely didn't have a smile on my face when I was baking them the night before!

I'm going to end this post with a quick video of Eli nibbling on a longhorn horn. I'm just glad everyone liked the cookies!