Italian Hazelnut Cookies: Channeling My Inner Green Fairy

Do y'all remember the fairies from Sleeping Beauty? My sister, Robin, and I used to love Sleeping Beauty. We used to pretend that we were the fairies fluttering around to save Princess Aurora. Naturally, I was always the red fairy, the leader, because I was the oldest and the bossiest. Robin was the green fairy because she was the middle child. We made Joseph be the short, fat, blue fairy. (He was too little to object).

This week I made dinner for a family who follows a gluten-free lifestyle. After the meal was prepared, I got ambitious and decided to also make them cookies. I figured that the gluten-free persons of this world probably don't get to eat cookies very often and that is a tragedy. I found these wonderful gluten free hazelnut cookies called "Brutti Ma Buoni" which means "ugly but good" in Italian. Only five ingredients... surely I can handle that.

If you regularly follow this blog, you've heard me lament about how I don't have the baking gene. I've become a pretty decent cook, but I'm a miserable baker. Enter the green fairy. There's this wonderful scene in Sleeping Beauty where the green fairy tries to bake Princess Aurora a birthday cake. Despite all her efforts and passion and positive attitude, she gets it all wrong. She ices the cake and tops it with candles before even getting it into the oven. While separating the egg yolks from the whites for my hazelnut cookies, I was feeling the green fairy's pain:

See that face? That was my face.

Eventually the green fairy gives up and summons her magic wand for help. With just a few flicks of that magic wand all is better in the fairy's cake baking world.

A whole carton of broken eggs and a few failed batches of batter down the drain later, my cookies actually turned out well. I was able to channel my inner magic wand ... eventually.

If you are interested in watching the clip from Sleeping Beauty so you can understand what the heck I'm talking about, click here.