I made A LOT of cookies Sunday. And I started writing about them Monday, but somehow lost the post – oddly, since Word press usually is good about saving even when I don’t tell it to.
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 …
