A few years ago I had an art exhibition at my supper club house. One of the artists wanted to do something related to women’s work, and talked about endurance baking for a couple of days, which struck me as funny, since I do endurance baking for 2 – 3 weeks every year at cookie season. She did jello instead of baking for that event, although I did see her selling cookies at a Bach Dancing & Dynamite concert like a year later or so, after which she also remembered to return my Betty Crocker cookie book that she’d borrowed .
Over the weekend, I did endurance baking – I made the two most time consuming cookie kinds – the spoon cookies and the baby rugelach that we call nukhorns. They take a long time because both types are formed by hand. I made the dough for the spoon cookies on Friday night, before the symphony, filling up one of my largest mixing bowls with a mixture of browned butter (3 pounds of butter!), sugar, flour, and vanilla. I spent Saturday night digging out little mounds of this dough and shaping them by pressing them into a spoon – and they’re sandwich cookies, so you have to make both sides of every sandwich. I had 175 cookies which means I made 350 little mounds and stuck them together with jam, which took me until 1:30AM. I mixed up the dough for the rugelach on Saturday morning, cottage cheese, butter, flour, and sugar, and formed it into disks – I think I has 11 – then on Sunday I rolled out the dough, and cut it into triangles and rolled them up like little croissants. Like last year, I feel that a great weight has lifted. I made the baby bassinet tupperware, about 4/5 full, plus two ice cream buckets.
In fact, I am considering taking a night off from cookies tonight, Monday … I just finished two hours of online class presentations, and now have to open the web conferencing software for another group to practice.
On Saturday morning, I also made 2 kinds of slice & bakes – the ginger cookies, and the cranberry pistachio icebox cookies. I was kind of disappointed with the cranberry pistachio ones – couldn’t get the size right, and they just seemed messy.
