My Head as a Cookie
Jennifer Flaten

A funny thing happened on Monday. I set fire to my head. As I re-read that sentence I can see how that doesn’t seem all that funny, but stay with me.

First, my head wasn’t engulfed, fully, in flames. It was lightly charred. Now at this point I know you are thinking “liar, liar; head on fire.” I know, I know, I am, on occasion, prone to slight exaggeration.

This time though, I swear I am not stretching the truth, much. I am embellishing the facts, for comic effect.

Let’s get back to my conflagration. I am sure by now you are on tenterhooks, simply dying, this is an example of exaggeration, I hope, to know how I flambéed my head

It all started when my mother decided that just any old birthday cake wouldn’t do for my birthday. Well, my not-a-birthday-this-year, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago. No, I decided to make a cookie cake.

Ah, but I didn’t want any old cookie cake. I wanted a cookie cake shaped and decorated to look like me. I wanted a Jennifer-cookie-cake.

I enlisted the help of the kids, who decorated with a gusto never before seen in cookie decorating-dom. Before you get all sentimental about what great kids they are, I need to tell you that a squabble broke out because they couldn’t agree to the shape of my glasses and the color of my eyes. They managed to solve the problem by giving me tri-colored eyes and glasses so fantastic they rivaled anything Elton John has ever worn.

Let me just say that nothing can shake your self-confidence like seeing yourself in frosting and M&Ms. As I gazed down at the masterpiece I remember thinking, I know it is cookie dough and it spreads, but “Really is my head that big!” After the big celebration and obligatory more candles then I care to admit. I packed up the remains of my cookie mini-me.

I couldn’t bring myself to cut cookie me into little pieces to fit in the cookie jar. I stuck the leftovers in the oven. You can see where this is going.

In my defense I never, ever store stuff in the oven, so it should come as absolutely no surprise that I promptly forgot all about my new cookie storage device. The next evening I preheated the oven. Yes, I know this is the truly hard to believe part, that I didn’t eat any of the cookie that day. I truly forgot it was there.

About 10 minutes into the preheat I noticed a delicious cookie aroma wafting from the kitchen. Oh, crap! The cookie head is in the now blazing hot oven – side note the new oven heats up fast! I ripped open oven door.

Oh the humanity, of it: my cookie head was barely recognizable. I was charred and brown. The candle was gooey, a puddle spread out across my now blistered forehead.

As I scraped the cookie head into the garbage can I couldn’t help thinking the worst part, besides having to tell my mother I torched my cookie cake, was the fact that I didn’t even get a piece of my own birthday cake.