my kitchen turned into a cookie shop.
OK, let me back up to the 1st Day of Christmas. I’ve lately been on a bit of a baking kick. Although my summer resolution to bake a loaf of bread a week has been rejected in favor of more pressing life work, I still have ended up scrolling through bread and cookie recipes, and stocking my cabinet with baking supplies for some future rainy day. Well, that rainy day came Monday, when it dropped to a bizarre 32 degrees (bizarre for Austin), looked overcast and about to snow and I figured that instead of writing, I’d spend the day baking.
This year I’ve decided to make cookie ornaments and gingerbread men, so the first day of Christmas was spent assembling lots of baking stuff. Icing bags, extra eggs, lots of flour and way too many sugar sprinkles.
Hannah and I have decided to make a gingerbread house, but I thought I’d play with making cookies first, since I have never made sugar cookies nor decorated cookies. A gingerbread house is a bit of an ambitious start. When I was out shopping for Christmas decorations I found these cool cookie cutters that make holes inside the cookies so you can melt candy inside them to get a “stained glass” effect.
I made 2 batches of dough, one a basic sugar cookie dough and another, from a recipe I found for ‘stained glass cookies’, with molasses for a deeper color and flavor. I’m sort of a perfectionist so I wanted to try two to find the one I liked. On the next day I rolled and cut all the cookies and baked them… the trick is to melt hard candy like Life Savers or Jolly Ranchers inside holes.
So here we are on the 5th day of Christmas. As you can see, being an artist, I got way more into this than I thought I would. I was driven to get the right icing, the right sprinkles… here I am, turning into a confectioner! Derek said, of course your cookies would look like a French patisserie–too pretty to eat! (But actually, they are very yummy. I know, because I just had to eat the broken ones. Ha.)
I had a bunch more dough left so I made a bunch of Star of David cookies near midnight. Our spirituality is a bit of a cross-breed, so to speak, and I need a reminder of what all the stars in Christmas decorations can really be about. (Hanukkah, by the way, begins at sundown on Sunday and goes all through Christmas week.)
