… are a lot of work. But they’re so charming. My brother calls them the little hamburgers – he would; that’s what they look like to a vegetarian. The original plan for last night was to make the Sambuca crinkles, then bake the spoon cookies, then, while they were cooling, make the coconut cookies. Ha. I made the Sambuca cookies, but the spoon cookies take so long to shape, squeezing bits of the dough into the spoon, that all I did while they were baking was shape more of them, and then while they were cooling, I was melting and straining the jam (a tasty mixture this year, BTW, of cherry, apricot, strawberry and raspberry, and I’m going to have good PB&J sandwiches the next few days with the resulting strained out, extra-fruit, apricot-cherry preserves). And, I don’t think that baking and then jam sandwiching them the next day is an option – seems to me you have to get them jammed while their pores are still open from the warmth of the baking for everything to adhere properly. Now, that’s the kind of stuff I worry about when I wake up in the night. I made 4X the recipe, 2 pounds of butter and 8 cups of flour, supposed to yield 120; I ended up with 110 – plus one extra free sample made from the last two spoons of dough – one of them was on the skimpy side – and they got a little too dark on the bottoms. I guess that’s not so far off. I used a smaller spoon this year than previous. I noticed a spoon that strikes me as smaller in the silverware drawer when I was putting stuff away. Maybe I’ll try that one next year. Or maybe I’ll find the perfect spoon at Goodwill, in the meantime.
