My recent Ode to Christmas shopping demands a follow-up. Ok, not really sure that it “demands” a successor, but I felt like writing it, so this will be a final penance for faithful readers before the holidays. Baking Christmas Cookies. We seldom if ever bake cookies during the regularly scheduled year. Store-bought is just fine, thanks. Susan likes chocolate-chip, which I like, but I sometimes deviate to ginger cookies or hermits. At the holiday season, though, there’s a whole renaissance of cookie baking that somehow is just a part of our humanity. Someday, scientists will identify the Winter Solstice Cooking Baking gene.
On one such holiday, I had been at school. Daughter was home from school. The two of them were scheduled to bake cookies. I was clearly primed to come home to the gentle, pleasant aromas of baking, fire in the fireplace, the oven timer going off, chestnuts roasting – ok, we don’t do that because, well, we’re not Dickens. What I came home to was cold, empty house. No baking, no cooking fragrances, nothing. The two of them arrived home a few hours later – it turns out they’d gone to the movies instead. What the heck – another Christmas memory irrevocably shattered.
This year we’re set. Shopping for all of the cookie ingredients is really something I dread all year. There will be items that normal “search and seizure”. Candied cherries, for example. While the grocery store employees are frantically restocking what people would normally buy – cake mixes, flour and sugar, that sort of thing, I’m hunting for candied cherries. The stockers have to make multiple trips to the stock room to find these. They also had not replenished the almond extract. What were they thinking? We do have three of those teensy little bottles of vanilla extract, but no . . . . weren’t using that this year. Why exactly do they put extract in those miniscule, eighth of an ounce bottles anyway? That must be something about which skilled bakers can brag. “Making dozens of cookies this year. I’ll probably go through two eyedroppers full of extract.” The chocolate people have gone nuts with chocolate morsels too. Once again, I scouring the baking aisle for semi-sweet, milk chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate / peanut butter, chocolate toffee bits. They must be in cahoots with the coffee folks. Then I had to swoop over to the candy aisle for Hersey kisses. Those will be either buried in or sitting proudly upon some varieties.
The day of the actual baking dawns brightly. Cookie sheets are assembled, wax paper is unrolled, cooling racks come out of their shelters. This is the big time. My wife is parked at the dining room table – she’s the foreman / assembly line. The dough is brought to her for formation and handling. It’s shaped into squares, round balls, attractive peaky things, whatever shape is required to maintain interest. This year’s addition is something with pretzels. I debated for what seemed like hours over the best type of pretzel to purchase, only to find out later they’re crushed to bits anyway. I could have used floor scrapings at the pretzel factory. Our daughter is the raw materials supervisor. She mixes the ingredients, prepares the ovens – oh yes, we’ll keep two working constantly at different temperatures. The mixer is whirring, flour is flying, pounds of butter are disappearing. In between, she’s bringing unbaked cookies from the formation center to the oven, then bringing the cooked ones back for the final, finishing touches of sprinkles, confectioner’s sugar. Apparently you can’t have too many sugars along with chocolate bits. There’s the granulated (which is the basic white sugar to the uninformed. Then, there’s brown sugar, which has a become a family – dark brown and its younger sibling, light brown. Confectioner’s sugar is the finely ground, powdery one that gets everywhere, particularly all over your clothes when you eat the cookie that’s coated in it.
Most of the cookies came out as intended, unlike the British counterpart. Wisely this year, my wife decided to freeze a bunch so they wouldn’t resemble and taste like the Dead Sea Scrolls by Christmas Day. They’ll be fresh and bursting with flavor. At least that’s the story I hear as I clean out the freezer so we can fit them in. One batch, the ones with the candied cherries for which I had a search and rescue team at the supermarket, started out as nice, plum little balls of red-flecked batter. They came out as flattened, crumbly disks. We still have our folks in quality control doing test samples to see what happened here. The cookies didn’t do that last year. If need be, we’ll send out our testers to the butter and flour factories to do some spot checking. Perhaps with Bob Mueller’s people wrapping up, there will be one or two investigators available. Or perhaps Paul and Pru could stop by to take a look – they’re very good at pointing out deficiencies.
My role in this is ancillary. I’m rather like Dobby, the house elf in Harry Potter. In fact, I was called that several times. I lend an emergency hand when needed, and responsibilities center primarily on clean-up. I wipe down the mixer paddle for the next go-around, keep the scrapers, bowls and spatulas coming, occasionally running to the spice rack. Often I’m like one of the nurses in surgery, handing the surgeon equipment. My daughter did, in a commanding voice, request ,“spatula” at one point , extending a hand as she was hunched over the mixer.
So, the cookies are nestled all snug in their beds. All in all, a good bake. That’s the last official preparation for the season. We maintain a strict protocol here – there’s the shopping, which truth to tell gets under way any time after April, then the house decorating, followed by the preparation of the cards. It takes a day or two of hunting down what we have in stock, whether we like them or not, and should we buy more? There’s a one to two day writing out of the cards. I don’t do this because my handwriting is, well, substandard, so Herself does this, perched over the table like a monk in a medieval monastery. I sometimes have to hire several locals to assist me in getting them to the Post Office. Then comes the wrapping, which I’ve described in detail in other writings. It is, however, an event of epic proportions. Finally, the cookie bake is like the final free skate and giant slalom at the Winter Olympics or Melania’s avenue of red trees. All is calm, all is bright – until we start cooking Christmas dinner. God bless us, every one!
I'm Thinking...No! 