Baking Challenge Week 32 (Late!) - Color - Lemon Pinwheels Fail

I've mentioned before that icebox cookies are hit or miss with me, I think.  At least I feel like I've said that.  I've certainly thought it.

Inspired by my success with yesterday's Thin Mint-alikes, I decided to try another icebox cookie, lemon pinwheels.  In theory, they were supposed to be a jelly-roll assembly of yellow (lemon-flavored) and plain (vanilla-flavored) dough, sliced into beautiful spirals.

Well, first of all, the dough seemed to be entirely the wrong consistency, all sticky and unmanageable.  I double-checked that I'd followed the recipe accurately (and I had), so when I started kneading the lemon extract and yellow food coloring into the first half of the dough, I just added more flour as I kneaded to make it firmer.  It worked, up to a point.

Then I looked at my yellow and plain doughs, and realized that there was very little contrast.  Since color is the point of the challenge, I decided to add red coloring to my "plain" dough, which needed to be kneaded (ha!) anyway, since I had to get more flour worked into it to match the yellow dough.

Then I started rolling them out.  Major fail.  All that stickiness reasserted itself the second I started rolling.  Nowhere in the recipe did it mention chilling the dough before assembly (only after), but it seriously would have helped.  I might have even been able to save the dough by chilling it at this point, but I was so frustrated with it that into the trash it went.

I am back on the fence about the usefulness of icebox cookies.  While it's fantastic that I still have half my Thin Mint dough in my freezer to slice and bake as desired, more than half of the recipes I've tried have been utterly wasted by the intransigence of the dough.  It seems like I should have better success with them than I do....