If anyone should ever give you the choice between baking a batch of lebkuchen cookies and, say, being thrown into a pit of ravenous lions, go with the lions.

Lebkuchen were originally a cake made by the peoples of pre-Christian Europe and later adapted by monks into cookie form sometime around the 13th century. And let's face it, those monks lived a pretty deprived life and were bound to be a little pissy.

Today, they're made mostly in Germany and my grandmother's house. Little did we know the tiny little woman with the white puff of hair has a sadistic streak.

Step one: Molasses. Now I admit, I've never bought molasses before. (And apparently, neither had anyone else in L.A. because the bottle was definitely dusty.) But there should be some sort of warning label. "Attention: The contents of this bottle smell like rotten, pussy pig feet. Open in a well ventilated area." But there was no label, so I had to call my mother.

Me: "Um...is this supposed to smell like a three-day-old corpse on a hot day?"

Mother: "Yep."

Me: "Well, we should definitely put it in some cookies then."

Mother: "You'll notice I never make them."

Step two: Mix with five and a half cups of flour. Do you know what happens when you mix molasses, which has the consistency of your average bucket of roofing tar, with five and a half cups of flour? You blow out the motor on your mixer for starters. Should you stupidly soldier on, three broken wooden spoons and a torn rotator cuff later, you'll have something you could use to grout your shower...if it didn't smell like pussy pig feet.

Step three: Refrigerate overnight, roll out and cut the cookies. In case you were wondering what happens when you put roofing tar in the fridge overnight, it sets up like spongy concrete. Spongy, sticky concrete with the distinct aroma of...well, you know. Again soldiering on, you'll need a bricklayer's trowel to remove said substance from the bowl. But whatever you do, don't let it touch anything. ANYTHING. The evil cookie tentacles of death will wrap their little sticky fingers around your counter, your rolling pin, YOUR HAIR and stick like the stench of failure on an aging movie star. The super glue people should look into this recipe.

Should you actually, manage to get the "dough" rolled out and cut into anything vaguely resembling a cookie, you will then need to do the special lebkuchen voodoo dance to keep them from turning from a merely room temperature ball of spongy, sticky concrete into a molten ball of spongy, sticky concrete in the oven. (Sure to produce those flattering burn scars all the fashionable ladies are wearing this season.)

Unfortunately, my recipe failed to adequately describe the dance.

Fortunately, my garbage disposal works very well.