When Pinterest fails: Cinco de Mayo pinata cookies
Last year, the week before Cinco de Mayo, I decided it would be cool to try making a popular Pinterest project that had been circulating like wildfire, pinned and repinned by seemingly every user on the visual bookmarking site:
Pinata sugar cookies, originally created by SheKnows.com.
Now, I'm no baker, but I do love to cook and am pretty damn good in the kitchen, thank-you-very-much. Sure, the recipe looked like a lot of work and had a lot of steps, but I thought to myself: "No sweat, I got this."
Nope, I didn't have it. Like, at all.
What I didn't think about before embarking on this clearly labor-intensive recipe was how MUCH work it was going to be, or the fact that "these multi-striped, burro pinata sugar cookies are frosted together in sets of 3's," clearly labeled in the SheKnows recipe introduction. Meaning, every dozen cookies yields only 4 pinata cookies. FOUR COOKIES. Here's the video tutorial, which I clearly should have watched before trying to make this recipe:
After about three hours spent making the dough — mixing the sugar cookie dough in my stand mixer, balling it into six portions, dyeing each one individually and then kneading it for about 15 minutes (per ball!) until the color was uniformly distributed, finally pressing them together to form a striped loaf — I ran out of time to make the cookies, so the dough (and the mini M&Ms) sat in my freezer…for a year. (Here's a shot of my dough, pulled out of my freezer for the first time yesterday.)
There's no way I'm subjecting the people I love to those cookies now, unless maybe I defrost the loaf and let my friends' kids use it for homemade Play-Doh. (More likely, it will end up in the garbage disposal.)
Luckily, I was able to save DIY face and pick myself back up after finding an entire blog dedicated to Pinterest Fails, where people addicted to Pinterest (like me) can share and view projects that didn't quite turn out as expected. Which happens way more often than not. As Jenna, the blogger behind Pinterest Fails, says, "It's not as easy at it looks on Pinterest. At some point most of us realize this."
Realization: check.
Will that stop me from tackling more project ideas from Pinterest? Over my dead cookie dough.
Do you have a story about a Pinterest project you tried that failed miserably? Or just didn't turn out the way you wanted? Did you pin or try making these pinata cookies? Love to hear from you!
The author is solely responsible for the content.
About the Authors
![]() |
Melissa Massello is a newspaper journalist turned startup junkie and lifelong Bostonian who prides herself on her do-it-yourself attitude. From making her prom dress out
More »
|
![]() |
Tara Bellucci is a Boston-based writer that lives for fonts, food, and flea market finds. Whether decorating jars of her homemade jam for The Boston More » |
Recent blog posts
- Swappable soup recipe and tips from National Soup Swap Day
- Teach yourself yoga basics at home with Yoga by Numbers
- 9 DIY projects to make your Olympics party feel like an authentic athlete experience
- Have a hack? The Grommet wants launch to your product
- Scratch make some Mexican hot chocolate this snow day with Taza