I will start off by saying, no one’s perfect.

I made the Peppermint Meringues from the current Food Network magazine, and had a lot of trouble with them. Actually, nine times out of ten when I’ve made cookies from Food Network magazine, I’ve had trouble.

I’m not a baking novice by any stretch of the imagination, and if I were, this recipe would discourage me and make me think I just wasn’t cut out for baking cookies.

Again, no one is perfect. I certainly screw up. Even with cookies. At least once a year while I do my 24 days of cookies, one batch doesn’t work.

This is that batch.

I make meringue cookies every year band have been doing so since Britney rocked a belly chain and low-rise jeans. I know the concept. So when my meringue didn’t set up (using the directions exactly as written), I was perplexed.

And then I started over. This time, I used powdered sugar instead of granular. While it wasn’t as bad as the first batch, it definitely wasn’t up to my meringue standards. That was the first problem.

My second problem came when trying to paint the red stripes in the pastry bag. It’s tough to do, and I ended up using an unused paint brush from my arts and crafts collection. I tried a pastry brush before this, and it looked like a crime scene. It was too big, and the plastic pastry bag isn’t exactly the easiest surface to paint on.

Novice bakers aren’t going to necessarily know to try something else. Heck, I really didn’t know what to do. I totally winged it.

I piped the shapes on the parchment, and because it was a limp and runny meringue, the consistency was off. But I figured I’d try and see what happened. The red stripes did come through, but as I piped more, the color wasn’t as strong. This makes sense to me, but the photo editors at Food Network magazine didn’t get the memo that their picture was to actually look like the cookies their readers would be creating.

After the hour in the oven, I turned off the oven and had them sit in the oven for another 2 hours. As the directions state.

When I took them out, I was again not pleased.

Brown. My white runny meringues spent too long in the tanning bed before prom, and didn’t look like what they were supposed to look like. That was the final problem with this recipe.

Did anyone else make this recipe and have it turn out well? Because at this point, I’m not actually convinced anyone at the magazine tested this recipe.