A heart-warming (err, cookie-burning) holiday story

Let me tell you a little holiday story.  I was feeling festive today, and have heard a lot of my friends talk about their holiday baking, so I decided I wanted to make some cookie gun spritz cookies.  We used to make these as kids, using the cookie gun my mom has had since SHE was a kid.  So my heart was warming at the thought.

I walked to the store, picked up the ingredients I was missing, and got ready once arriving home.  I turned on the Christmas music, made sure my tree was lit up, and got it alllll going.  I made the dough and squeezed out 1 tube's worth of cookies onto the 1st sheet.  As I got about halfway done with the 2nd sheet, my cookie gun broke.  Yes, that'd be the nice cookie gun from Crate & Barrel that had been used approximately once before.  And it broke in a way that makes it totally and forever toast, not recoverable.  Crap.

I decide this isn't going to stop me, so I roll up some balls of dough, smash 'em flat, and put them on the sheet.  I add some ADORABLE blue and white snowflake sprinkles, plus some lovely sparkly rainbow sprinkles on others, and pop them in.  After about 6 minutes, I decide to check on them.  I peek through the oven window and see the edges looking way too dark.  I open the oven to get a closer look and smoke pours out.  Double crap!

All of a sudden, my smoke detectors are going off, my apartment is filling with smoke (it's a small apartment, so that isn't totally unimaginable), and it smells like burnt cookie.  I put the pans out on the balcony to air out and start fanning the air under my smoke detectors to try and get them to stop.  UGH.

So, I ended up with 2 sheets of burnt cookies (I may have eaten the only 3 cookies that weren't totally black on the bottom), a big bowl of uncooked dough, and a irreparably broken cookie gun.  Allow me illustrate with photos.

My kitchen, as they're cooking.  The flour all over is evidence of my effort, obviously.

The poor cookies, smoking out on my balcony

A LOT of leftover dough

Sad, sad, very sad cookies

The final resting place of the cookies, the dough, and the devilish Crate & Barrel cookie gun... before I took it all to the trash drop

So, if anyone has any leftover holiday treats, feel free to pass them my way!  I'm not sure I should try THIS again anytime soon...  :)

(P.S.  I've always known that my oven cooks a little hot, so I tend to set the oven 5 or 10 degrees below what the recipe calls for.  Perhaps I should start cutting it by 20 degrees...?)