Joy of Cooking lebkuchen

These are the ones that are kind of a sleeper – just a plain brown bar cookie, with a lemon & powdered sugar glaze that tastes mostly like raw cornstarch and too-sharp lemon at first. They age and mellow and the combination gets pretty special.

I also made these fruit balls, that are a Molly Wizenberg recipe – but they still need to be topped with chocolate – they’re not wearing their cute chocolate hats, as she says. That’ll be tomorrow. Looks like last year I thought they’d be a good batch – I think this year’s will be even better.

Anyways, I made the dough for the nukhorns, 3X, 12 rounds of dough to be rolled out and filled with nuts and brown sugar.

Then I made the spritz, which was satisfying, not only because I had to go to three grocery stores to get the Christmas M&Ms, but also because last year something was not right, and a dismaying number of the spritzes broke when I tried to take them off the pan. Maybe it was because I couldn’t pull the trigger hard enough on the cookie gun with my broken thumb. Maybe it was the Costco flour. Or maybe it was the composition of the dough. I use the recipe from the Betty Crocker Cooky Book, and I have 2 editions, 1965, with a “Merry Christmas, Debra” inscription on the inside cover in my grandmother’s hand; and 1977 that I bought myself. The ingredients are just a little different, in amounts of sugar and flour, and whole egg or egg yolk, plus I have annotated both recipes, with my past thinking on spritz-cookie-dough butter:flour:sugar ratio. I had 9 egg yolks left from all the almond paste cookies, so I went with the 1965 version that calls for yolks, further reasoning that since the cookie gun was manufactured in the ’60s, I was matching the formula with the tools of the times. Seems to have worked.

I made Mark’s rolled ginger bread, and royal icing’d them, and took a dinner break to watch the season finale Boardwalk empire (since we’re grownups and can do whatever we want, as Mark said, we ate the last couple of slices of the Thanksgiving pies with ice cream for our main course, and “free sample” – broken & mishapen – cookies for sides). Afterwards, I made the chocolate toffee bars and the raspberry-almond bars. The chocolate toffee bars are from Silver Palate, and the raspberry-almond Richard Sax’s Classic Home Desserts – both long time members of the cookie pantheon, that I make almost as written, with my well practiced tweaks. On Monday, it took almost an hour to cut up all the bars and pack them into containers – well, and I washed all the cookie sheets, too. Three more night to go …

Not quite sure what happened yesterday – I had big cookie plans that I did not quite achieve. The night before I came home from a latke party, and made cocnut cookies, and world peace cookie dough. Saturday morning, we slept in a bit, because it was still snowing, then we shoveled out the driveway & front walk. I made the dough for the Moravian ginger thins – they’re in the front, star shapes, in this shot from last year. Then I tried an experiment, mint chocolate chip cookies, from a recipe I found online, that I liked because it used up two things I had in the freezer – 2 bags each of mint chocolate chips, and King Arthur Flour Co. sugar cookie mix (that they sent me as freebie for spending beaucoup bucks with them). I decided to tint them green, per the recipe, to tip off any unsuspecting cookie eater who might think it was a non-mint chocolate chip cookie. I think they have potential – I might try them next year with a from-scratch drop sugar cookie dough, and the mint chips. They’ll probably be someone’s favorite cookie.

Then I went out for errands and presumably a swim – that I never got to. When I got home, I baked a bunch of the almond paste types: pine-nut macaroons, and another new one this year, an almond cookie with chocolate stars glued on top. All from the Odense marzipan site – I was tired of the Gourmet pignoli cookie recipe I’d been using; they’re too pale. These, from the presumable marzipan experts, are more what I like in a macroon – golden brown. And I think the chocolate star almond cookies are a keeper, too – even though I ran out of stars.

I finished the night by baking Dorie Greenspan’s world peace cookies, and making the dough for Mark’s rolled ginger – that I hope to bake today.

I guess I shouldn’t feel too bad about underachieving – besides shoveling, I did a load of laundry, folded all the clean stuff, and made a pan of mac & cheese for dinner. Oh yeah, and paid bills and answered a few student questions in my online course. Today, I gave the cats fresh newspaper under their litter, baked a coffee cake, and now I’m off I hope to that swim (or maybe a walk), followed by rolled ginger, ginger thins, a bunch of bar cookies, and spritz – I hope.

Dunno how tonight’s going to turn out – here it is 8:12 and I have not even started yet. I think I will get the boomerangs done, and make the doughs for spoon cookies and Sambucca crinkles, but I probably won’t make the coconut cookies. And I have t stop trying to photograph cookies at night …

And lo and behold, all the food snobs around the house gobbled them up. I wasn’t surprised when the middle school girls hit them up right away, but I had 3, and even Al had a couple.

And the furnace seems to be working OK again – the horrendous noise has stopped. It’s still a little loud, but I think I’ve bought a little more time on the 18-year old furnace, for just a couple hundred bucks. Shoulda given the furnace guy a krispie treat.

Peanut butter rice krispie treats with chocolate topping

Anyways, trying to use up the surfeit, I tried this recipe for lemon bars with a sour cream topping, like what’s on cheesecake. It used up a whole 2 cups of sour cream. I was trying to not overcook the lemon filling, and they ended up good, but really gooey. Al, who really likes lemon bars, turned down my offer of a tupperware of them to take back to Minneapolis.

They’ll be going to work tomorrow.

Sour cream-topped lemon bars

I tried to plan things so that people could be as acetic or extravagant in their food choices as they wished – well, in the confines of a simple soup dinner, anyways. So there was a vegan soup, greens & garlic soup from Anna Thomas newer Vegetarian Epicure – it was definitely the unexpected hit of the night. A whole head of garlic, onions, and greens – I used spinach and curly & lacinto kales – broth (although one of the funny things about Thomas book is a lot of the recipes say “chicken or vegetarian broth), cubed potatoes, white wine, and a dash of rice vinegar to bring the flavor up. I think it was so good because I used several kinds of veggie broth I had frozen, one made with greens, one with lots of herbs, one a kind of standard carrot, celery, onion, garlic broth. Paired with the greens soup was 101 Cookbooks seeded flatbread, also vegan, no eggs or dairy.

The other two soups were from the Ovens of Brittany, a long-ago restaurant chain in Madison WI, where I worked for about 4 years: Cream of vegetable, and Spanish country soup. The cream of vegetable was the rich one, although I used whole milk & half & half, rather than the heavy cream called for. I did use all the butter specified; almost 2 sticks, 14 TBLS, but dispersed through a little over a gallon of soup – at least 15 servings, so not really all that much butter when divided by servings.

The bread to go with the cream soup was buttermilk pull-aparts, from this Saveur recipe. The bread for the Spanish country soup – that I made with bratwurst & bacon instead of ham & chorizio – was long-rise no-knead, a brown loaf and a white sourdough, that I think was the best sourdough I’ve ever made.

And then there were 3 kinds of bar cookies for dessert – Dorie Greenspan’s blondies; brownies – I used a cakier King Arthur recipe, rather than my standard very fudgy ones; and raison bars, filling from an old better Homes & Gardens cookie book, crust from Betty Crocker.

Chicken liver pate with seedy flatbread wedges

But we’ve been eating the leftovers all weekend, such as there was. I took some of the flatbread and a little pate – also a leftover, frozen since the cookie party – over to Steve & Heike’s, where we ate them with smoked oysters and a beer and akmak for a little snack before going to see David Bromberg and Jorma Kaukonen. Watching these two old pickers was great fun – I’d forgotten how funny Bromberg is – someone called out a request and he said:

Look at me. I’m a shlubby overweight Jewish guy, and being up here is the most power I get. You people might know what you want to hear, but you have no idea how to compose a set”.

I think he’s the Daniel Pinkwater of folk. I’d also forgotten his funny lyrics – “Don’t let the glasses fool you” – that should be my motto.

I took the last half of the sourdough loaf, and the last brownies and raison bars to John yesterday. We passed through Milwaukee on the way to a West HS hockey game, and had lunch at Honeypie.

That leaves only the bucket of cream o’ veg left – can’t decide if we should eat it for dinner tonight, or it’s work lunches for me the rest of the week.

Yogurt bucket of cream o' vegetable soup