A Brimly NewsletterRoom Temperature
I Followed It Exactly and It Still Came Out Wrong
A cookie tin, a can of chickpeas, and the last time I trusted Pinterest.
September 4, 2026
“Chickpeas”— Image courtesy of Brimly
My inbox has decided it is fall.
Every newsletter I open this week is about squash or spice or what to look forward to, and I am not immune to it. Summer starts winding down and my brain jumps straight to what’s next, what we should be planning, what the big thing is going to be.
Which is how I ended up thinking about Cookie Month, and the worst thing that has ever happened to me in a cookie tin.
About a year ago, right around now, I decided I was going to do a month of cookies in December. I had watched other food blogs run Cookie Week for years and I wanted in. So I committed, and I want to say plainly that I stuck to it, which still impresses me a little.
What I did not do was think it through.
Every cookie idea worth having lives on the internet in a version I cannot make. Gluten-free is the easy half. Gum-free is where things fall apart, and I jumped into December with hope and very little else.
The food coloring went first. I tested some early on, did not react well to it at all, and that was the end of that conversation. So now I was looking for plant-based color, or working out how to get color out of actual food, which is its own project and not one I had budgeted for.
But the part my mind keeps returning to is the icing.
“Whoopie Pie Cookies”— Image courtesy of Brimly
Coconut Whoopie Pie Cookies
I wanted royal icing for the ginger snap sandies. Proper holiday cookie icing, the kind that sets hard and holds a line, because those cookies were built for decorating. They roll thin, they do not spread, they bake with clean square edges, and the icing sits flat on top of them the way you want it to. The problem is that royal icing traditionally runs on raw egg white, and I have a relationship with raw eggs that I would describe as hostile. Saying the words out loud makes me burp. I bake with eggs constantly and I still find them difficult, which I accept is my own issue to carry.
So I went looking for a version without them, and Pinterest handed me one.
Aquafaba. Drain a can of chickpeas, pour the liquid into the stand mixer, run it on high for about fifteen minutes, add sugar and vanilla as you go, and you get a royal icing dupe. That was the promise.
I want to be honest that I did not like it from the start. You are draining bean water into a mixing bowl and then putting it on Christmas cookies. I assumed it would smell beansy. I assumed it would taste beansy. Every part of me was skeptical.
But the photos were beautiful. And I have written before about how the photo is the ad for the recipe, so I should have known better than anyone what a good photo can talk you into. It talked me into this.
And here is the truly maddening part.
It worked. That aquafaba whipped up into something marshmallowy and white and pillowy and genuinely impressive, and I stood there being wrong about it in the best way. I found a brand of allergy-safe, chemical-free coloring and it blended in perfectly. The beany smell faded the moment the vanilla went in. I piled that icing onto my cookies, spread it out evenly, decorated the lot of them.
They looked great. I was having a wonderful time.
The icing needed to set before I could photograph anything, so photos would have to wait until the next day. Once everything was cool and firm I packed every cookie into a Christmas tin I had been saving for exactly this, closed the lid, left it on the counter, and shut the kitchen down for the night.
“Ginger Snap Cut-Out Sandies”— Image courtesy of Brimly
Gluten-Free Ginger Snap Cut-Out Sandies
I came back the next morning genuinely excited. Lifted the lid.
Cracks. Everywhere.
Across the top of every single cookie, right through the icing, like something had dried out and split overnight. The colors had shifted too, into shades that were not the shades I had mixed. I stood there looking into that tin trying to work out what I had done, and I still do not know. I have no explanation for what happened inside that tin between midnight and morning.
The cookies underneath were delicious. That is almost worse. The cookies were fine and the decoration had ruined them, and I was not going to put any of it in my mouth, because whatever chemistry took place in there overnight was not chemistry I understood.
I was mortified. Not annoyed. Mortified. It felt like an open-handed slap I had walked directly into.
And it was not my first one. That is the thing. Every time I find a recipe on Pinterest it looks exciting, and I try it, and I am disappointed, and this has happened enough times that I have simply stopped. Not out of snobbery. Out of self-preservation.
Here is the lesson I actually took, and it is the one I would pass on. I doubted that recipe at the very first step. The bean water gave me pause and I overrode it because the pictures were pretty. So now, when something in a recipe makes me hesitate, I take the hesitation seriously. I go with my gut the first time it speaks up instead of the third.
The ginger snaps, for the record, are still on this site and they are excellent. If you look at the storage note at the bottom of that recipe, the line about letting the icing cure fully before you store them, now you know exactly where that came from.
It is also the whole reason I test the way I do here. Every recipe on this site gets made and remade until I am confident it will behave in your kitchen the way it behaves in ours. Not because I am precious about it. Because I know exactly what it feels like to open the tin the next morning.
“Shortbread Squares”— Image courtesy of Brimly
Gluten-Free Lemon-Thyme Shortbread Squares
So tell me I am not alone in this. I know I am not alone in this.
And if anybody out there knows what aquafaba icing does overnight in a sealed tin, I am still, a full year later, waiting to find out.
One More Thing!
Given everything I have just told you about Pinterest, it feels only fair to admit that we are on Pinterest too. The difference, and I say this with my whole chest, is that every recipe behind those pictures has actually been made in our kitchen more than once before it went up. No bean water surprises. Come find us there if you want somewhere safer to save things from.
And I want the stories. What recipe from the internet has failed you? Write and tell me what you were making and what came out instead. I will share the best ones, no names attached, because we have all followed something exactly and watched it go wrong anyway.
Thanks for reading, and see you next Friday.
Write to me at hello@brimly.co. Past issues are archived here.
Stephnie Grace is a recipe developer, editor, and co-founder of Brimly, specializing in gluten-free, soy-free, and gum-free baking. She writes Room Temperature, which lands every Friday.
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Steph writes about what actually happens in a gluten-free kitchen. Sends weekly.
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