My annual Ode to Christmas shopping demands a follow-up. Well, it may not technically “demand” a coda, but I’m in the mood to write it, so this could be my last posting before the holidays, unless Clement Moore inspires me to write a Victorian Christmas Classic, which I seriously doubt. After a sensible time of reflection and renewal, I’ll wax eloquent on the New Year and all of its glorious potential. But for now, let’s talk about the universal tradition – baking Christmas cookies. We seldom if ever bake cookies during the year. Oh, sure, we have decorative cupcakes and candies for Valentine’s Day, breads for Easter, Apple Pie on the 4th of July, and pumpkin breads in the fall. Most of the time, though, store-bought works just fine. Susan likes chocolate-chip, which I like too, and I sometimes swerve into ginger cookie or hermit land. 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 a Winter Solstice Cooking Baking gene embedded in our DNA.
I’ve probably told this before, and if I have, just skip to the next paragraph. It does bear retelling, in the category of Great Christmas Disappointments. I had been at school all day. The Daughter was home from college. She and her mother had determined that it was a great day 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 a scene from A Christmas Carol. What I came home to was a cold, empty house. No baking, no tantalizing fragrances of baking, nothing. The two of them arrived home several hours later – they’d decided to go to the movies instead. Another Christmas image shot from the guns.
Again this year, we’re set. Shopping for all of the cookie ingredients is really something I don’t look forward to all year. There will be items other than the normal “search and seize”. Candied cherries, for example. While the grocery store employees are frantically restocking what people would normally buy – cake mixes, flour, sugar, and chocolate chips, for example, I’m hunting for candied cherries. The stockers have made multiple trips to the stock room to find them, made more difficult because teenage boys don’t really know what they are, much less what they look like. 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, six drop bottles anyway? “Making dozens of cookies this year. I’ll probably go through two eyedroppers full of extract.” Last year, The Daughter had me hunting for coconut water for some exotic recipe, as distinct from coconut milk or coconut oil. This must be a cut above, because it was hiding on different aisle. 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 undisclosed, end-of-the-aisle location.
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 Admiral on the Bridge. The dough is brought to her for formation and handling. It’s shaped into squares, round balls, attractive peaky cones and pyramids, whatever shape is required to maintain interest. This year’s addition is something with pretzels. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. How can any decent cookie come from pretzels? They’re salty and usually accompany the sipping of beer. I debated a couple of hours what 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. The Daughter is the RMS – 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, icing, sprigs of holly. You can’t have too many sugars or kinds of 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 to various shades of light brown. I’m working on a new invention that I call the Off-Beige Sugar. Not quite light brown, but more than white granulated. 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 with it or when you turn the mixer on.
Most of the cookies came out as intended. Wisely this year, Herself decided to freeze a bunch so they wouldn’t 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 some of Bob Mueller’s people will be available to take flour testimony and go back through confectionary email. Somebody needs to get to the bottom of this whole cookie debacle. If Paul and Prue have a moment after the holidays, perhaps they could stop by to take a look – they’re very good at zeroing in on what went wrong.
My role in this whole nefarious affair is ancillary. I’m like Dobby, the house elf in Harry Potter. In fact, I was called that several times. I step in only when asked in times of stress, but my 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 dashing to the spice rack. I’m like one of the nurses in surgery, handing the surgeon equipment. My daughter did, in a commanding voice, request a “spatula” at one point, extending a hand as she was hunched over the mixer, keeping her eyes focused on the dough.
Ah, 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 strict protocols here – there’s the shopping, which truth to tell gets under way anywhere from September on, 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. All is calm, all is bright – until we start cooking Christmas dinner. God help us, every one!
I'm Thinking...No! 