Thanks, Williams-Sonoma!

Bloody hell! I haven't posted since January!

Last night, I had a baking mishap like I've never had before. Last week(was it?) Mom picked out this Williams-Sonoma baking book, and Lauren and I had a hankering for dessert last night, so I thought I'd go ahead and do what I planned to do all week, and try out the butter-pecan cookies. Well! I must be extremely stupid, because the recipe called for 4 tablespoons of butter, and 1 1/2 cups of flour(among other things) and I just thought, "Okay," and went ahead with the recipe!

Cookies with 4 tablespoons of butter? Seriously?

It refused to become dough. Finally, it dawned on me that there was a mistake in the recipe, because you cannot make cookies with that little butter, unless you're using some zany low-fat recipe with weird ingredients, or if you're a magician. Since the basic construction seemed like a nut crescent/butter ball/Mexican wedding cake/Russian tea ball, I looked up the recipe in The Best Recipe and sure enough, they said all the recipes they tested only varied in the kind of nuts and amount of sugar, and all had the basic ratio of 1 part butter to 2 parts flour.

4 tablespoons of butter is how much? 1/4 cup of butter? A 1:2 ratio would be 3/4 cup...if my math is correct.

I tried to add the half-stick of butter after the dough(which had the consistency of beach sand) was mixed, but I didn't expect it to work, and it didn't. I would've needed an extra half stick of butter, anyway, but I didn't want to sacrifice it for a recipe that was fundamentally broken(butter isn't cheap, boys and girls!) I managed to form 8 miserable little balls(even though it seemed more like I was making some kind of rock out of sand) and they tasted basically like flour, and crumbled to dust when I tasted one. Lauren actually ate an entire one, poor girl. Cute.

I'm so fed up. I hate knitting from patterns with mistakes, and now using recipes with mistakes? Don't you assume from the start that when you use a recipe, that it'll only be a colossal failure if YOU do something stupid?