Yes, it is complete. The 2024 Christmas Cookie Bake. Saturday was the day. All of the excitement, second-guessing, the anticipation as baking sheets go in, and come out of the oven. And now, the cookies are settled snugly in their beds, well plastic storage containers, but still.
The process began last week with cookie selections. Which ones went well in previous years, which ones were a lot of work and, in the end, nobody particularly cared. The list of possibilities has been pared down to a half dozen. The next stage is shopping: lists of ingredients. What do we have on hand? I’ve already stocked up on sugar, flour, butter, milk. There’s a bottle of molasses unopened. Hope it isn’t past its “best used by” date. I’ve been on the lookout for Hershey’s peppermint striped Kisses, and found them a week or so ago, quite by chance. Shopping for the ingredients is rather like a scavenger hunt. Typically, the list will include a couple of items of which I’ve never heard or seen. Our Baking Assistant will explain to me what it looks like and where it might be in the store. It isn’t usually there, but rather in some remote location – the Outer Mongolia of the supermarket. You know, the ones that will cause normally well-trained stocking people at the supermarket to pause, frown, and look wildly around. Candied something, or a special decoration, for example. While the grocery store employees are frantically restocking normal items, as they normally are just before the holidays for the normal shoppers – cake mixes, flour and sugar, that sort of thing, I have them stopping to search every aisle for candied whatever. Out back to the store rooms, next door to the Hallmark store they go. On Dasher, on Dancer. Once again, I scour the baking aisle for an endless variety of chocolate bits – semi-sweet, bitter-sweet, milk and dark chocolate, white chocolate, chocolate / peanut butter, chocolate with bits of other stuff mixed in like candy bars. Did you know that “chocolate” has become a dynasty, spreading in all directions, like the branches of the House of Windsor?
And the fun begins. Her Ladyship is perched in her seat of command like Captain Kirk at the dining room table, recipes at the ready. She’s facing the kitchen so that she can issue directions to the kitchen, where the Baking Assistant has prepped the cookie sheets, uncovered the mixer, brought out every conceivable bowl and utensil, unleashed the waxed paper and parchment. (Why do we have parchment? Wasn’t that something that monks wrote on in the Middle Ages?) Anyway, the day breaks bright and full of promise.
So, we’re off. Is the camera rolling? Can everyone hear me? Actually, there are no cameras, but it would make great television. Not unlike the Bride of Frankenstein on “House Hunters”, who insists on a white kitchen and not one of the options had it. Or the couple moving to Borneo, where they know nobody but need a large space for entertaining. The first batch of cookie dough is brought to Herself for formation and skilled handling. It’s shaped into squares, round balls, attractive little cookies with peaks in the center, whatever shape is required to create interest. They’re placed on baking sheets, covered as I said before on parchment without the monks’ calligraphy. Spacing is essential, because otherwise they’re liable to melt together into one gigantic cookie. An addition last year was something with pretzels. I searched for what seemed like hours for the ones specifically on the list, only to find out later they’re crushed to bits, so it didn’t make any difference. This year, I just grabbed the first bag I saw. The Baking Assistant also is the Ingredient Supervisor. She mixes them, checks the flavor combinations like a seasoned pro, prepares the ovens – oh yes, we’ll keep two working constantly at different temperatures and with the oven racks spaced out so we can switch the sheets periodically. The mixer is whirring, flour is flying like a sandstorm, sticks of butter and eggs are disappearing. In between, she’s bringing unbaked cookies from the formation center to the ovens, then bringing the cooked ones back for the final, finishing touches. Sugars are like chocolate bits – there is an infinite variety. There’s the granulated (which is the basic white sugar to the uninformed. There’s brown sugar, which has a become a family – dark brown to different shades of light brown. Confectioner’s sugar is the finely ground, powdery one that gets everywhere, particularly all down your front when you eat the cookies so coated.
The cookies are beginning to emerge. Some are flat, some little balls, some with little pointy striped caps. Some have ground pistachios – I’ll avoid those, as I don’t do nuts. Most of the cookies came out as intended. There were couple of violations of personal space among the snickerdoodles, but not many. We started freezing a bunch last year so they won’t all revert back to a state of bricks and mortar by Christmas. They’ll be fresh and bursting with flavor, if we remember to unthaw them in time. At least that’s the story I hear as I clean out the freezer so we can fit them in.
My role in this, after conducting an inventory and adventures in shopping, is several steps down the ladder. As I may or may not have mentioned before, I’m like Dobby, the house elf in Harry Potter. I’ve been historically called that, at the ready for emergency washing of the mixer bowl or whips. I lend a hand when needed, which usually come in sternly issued commands from either the Supervisor or the Baking Assistant. Around these parts, I prefer to think of myself as the “clean up specialist”. I wipe down the mixer paddle for the next go-around, keep the scrapers, bowls and spatulas coming, occasionally making a dash to the spice rack. Or, often I’m like one of the nurses in surgery, handing the surgeon equipment. A couple of years back, the Baking Assistant did, in a commanding voice, request “SPATULA”, extending a hand as she was hunched over the mixer. Then, the final cleaning, because, by the end, the kitchen looks those pictures of the Midwest where a tornedo has touched down.
It looks like this year’s bake is an overall success. Six different kinds of cookies are on the dining room table, snapped into plastic containers, waiting for final disbursement and distribution. Yes, my faithful readers, all in all, a good bake. That’s the last official preparation for the season except for Christmas dinner. I’m not sure if every household maintains the protocols as we do. Her Ladyship keeps order and schedules, well, on schedule. The cookie bake is like the final free skate and giant slalom at the Winter Olympics, just before the closing ceremonies.
This concludes the cookie bake for another year. Six varieties, way more than we can sensibly eat. I’ll drop some off at doorsteps. I’ll sample a few before my afternoon nap. Then a few more with my evening tea. I won’t test my blood sugars until mid-January. Once again, the cookie bake is in the record books, being sent to the Archives. The cooling racks are away and the cookie sheets returned to their shelves for another year, or until the next cookie craving. The mixer is deeply breathing a sigh of relief. The chocolate inventory has been recalibrated and repacked, along with the pecans. All is returning to calm, which is relative – until we start cooking Christmas dinner. As Tiny Tim would invoke, “God bless us, every one!”
Have a wonderful, blessed Christmas.
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