The other day I stumbled upon a recipe for Gingerbread Kiss Cookies. They looked delicious, so obviously the first thing I did was copy the link to give to my wife. As I was about to hit send, I had a better idea: I’ll just make them myself. Get out your chef hats and aprons, it’s baking time!

I did need help figuring out what ingredients we already had because I can’t be bothered to open a cupboard. Once my wife we made the determination that we had about half of the ingredients, it was off to the local grocer. Everything I needed was in the same aisle (very convenient) except for the Hershey’s Kisses and eggnog. The recipe doesn’t require eggnog, but I do. I made my purchase and headed home.

A beautiful selection of spices and other things that you bake with. I decided to forego the kosher salt and used, you know, salt, because I live in society.

Here we have the necessary tools to make some tasty treats. You amateurs probably don’t use parchment paper, but it’s an indispensable part of the baking process for us professionals. It make cookie no sticky. Yes those are my kids’ measuring cups, but he wasn’t using them.

Got my ingredients, got my tools, time to start baking. I mean you basically just follow the directions at this point. The butter is supposed to be softened when you mix it with the brown sugar. Hand up on that one, didn’t plan enough ahead to do that. But a real man like me will just beat it even if it’s a little hard.

Once I got that to completion, I added the dry ingredients. I will never not make a mess when using flour, but I’d say today was a relative success. Once the dough was done, just had to ball them up, roll them in sanding sugar (?) or whatever the equivalent was that I bought, and stick them in the oven. This was essentially a guessing game because I had no idea how big to make them. Are these going to cook all the way through? I still need to smash some kisses on these things. Whatever, let’s roll with it and hope for the best.

Listen, I don’t use the word perfection lightly, but those things are immaculate. Forgive the lighting on the second pic; those are not pretzel dogs.

So all in all, a pretty successful day for Chef Nick. I made some dope ass cookies, and I learned I don’t need my wife to make sweet treats for me all of the time. Most of the time, sure, but not all of the time. I now will be offering my services moving forward. If you need lessons or are running a bake sale that needs a guaranteed hit, I’m your guy.