It's not obvious, but the cookies you are setting in the controller are in response object, but the ones you are reading in the view are in the request object.
What this means is you can't easily read the cookies you set in the current request (but your code will work for subsequent requests)
To do what you are trying to do, I would not use cookies. Use the session[:user_id] value to reload a @current_user object on every request using a before_filter, and then you can use that to display the info you want.
