Caitlin 'n Life: Moon Moon, the Christmas Reindeer

So early this week I had the idea to bake some sort of holiday themed goodie to bring into work on our last day before our holiday break and to give out to family/friends over the holidays. I wanted to do something cute - I randomly brought in Minnie Mouse themed cupcakes early this year and they were a big hit. ------------------------>

So this week I looked around the web and I found a cute reindeer peanut butter cookie recipe that looked super easy to do. I'm still fairly new to baking I didn't want to attempt something I didn't feel confident I could pull off. I went out to the grocery store yesterday to get the extra ingredients I would need to bake tonight.

Now, I'm not the best judge on telling when food is ready to come out of the oven. I'm either way too early or way too late, so I usually have my boyfriend, Adam, double check that part for me. I rolled up the cookie dough balls, stuck them in, and called Adam down every time I thought they might be ready and finally he ok'd them to come out. The trick with this recipe is you have to add the "antlers" (pretzels) and the "eyes & nose" (M&Ms) immediately after taking the cookies out of the oven so they harden around the decorations and set in properly. I had two sheets full, so I asked Adam to stick around to help me with this step, which he thought would be fun and had no problem doing.

We were acting stupidly silly with each other and joking about the back story to the different reindeers. Adam even made one with red eyes and sharp antlers to make it a "devil reindeer", the one spoof out of our set that we would keep for just ourselves. Once we were all done decorating, I started switching the cookies over to a cooling rack. They looked so good! I was so proud of how they turned out - they looked a lot like the picture! I got over to Adam's pan and something didn't seem quite right. They didn't really look like the picture and I couldn't figure out why. The more I studied them to find out what was wrong, the more they looked like "special" reindeer. Their faces were contorted and you couldn't tell their eyes apart from their noses. And then it hit me. Adam hadn't noticed the pointed noses of the reindeers I had pinched while they were dough to form the structure of the faces. He had completely disregarded this and gone with his own "vision" and placed the eyes and noses randomly and all over the place. All of Adam's cookies looked like this and he had more than half of the batch on his pan.

I asked Adam, in hysterics, why his cookies didn't look like mine to which he explained to me that he had "creative freedom" with his and made some into birds and some were to look like David Bowie and/or an alien. "But I didn't want birds and David Bowie cookies...I needed reindeer!" I asked Adam why he didn't just put the noses on the spot that was meant for the nose like I did on mine. He just didn't see it... This is why I don't ask him to help me decorate things. No one sees my vision... le sigh.

These are what the Reindeer cookies were supposed to look like:

These are what mine looked like:

These are how Adam's turned out:

I mean, really? What is that? This one doesn't even have antlers:

This one was supposed to be an alien, according to Adam, and I tried to fix it for him by adding the nose and now it just looks like a tweaked out bird: