Debby Does…

My first real baking journey began with our annual Christmas cookies.  I know that doesn’t make us special; everyone bakes Christmas cookies.  Ours just had a certain something about them that made them highly coveted.  We spent the weekends after Thanksgiving getting our cookies baked and into the freezer for safe keeping (more about that later).  

We baked some standard cookies:

• Chocolate chip with the recipe right off the yellow chip bag.  These are a classic.  It’s a required cookie.  Everyone has their favorite version.  
• Sugar with colored sugar and sprinkles.  These were not artistically rendered.  We had a rag tag collection of cookie cutters and two bakers who were less than skilled at decorating.  Still, they were tasty. 
• Peanut butter.  Now I stand by this fine recipe.  It came from dear Aunt Susie on my dad’s side, and she was a superior baker.  I still bake these cookies and hoard them like crazy.  

Then, we had our specialty items, which changed over the years, based on what we thought was best:  

• Oatmeal lace or, as my mom’s carpool partner called them, the brown plastic ones.  Despite his description, they are insanely good, as long as you bake them on parchment.
• Peanut Butter Temptations—these had the peanut butter cup in the center of the cookie dough ball.  My dear friend, Kevin, could eat these until he was sick.  
• White Chocolate Macadamia Nut were my husband’s favorites.  We didn’t make them every year, but when we did, we had to guard them against his thievery.  

And, of course there was the fudge; two layers, one chocolate and one peanut butter, all held together with Marshmallow Fluff.  The original recipe, which I still have, came out of Good Housekeeping Magazine in the form of an ad for Kraft products.  The recipe was written oddly which made mistakes common.  In her inimitable style, Judy rewrote it, but we still mess it up almost every time.  

Other cookies and sweets came and went, but our standard items were favorites.  People looked forward to our cookie trays and boxes every year, but what I looked forward to was the time baking in our little kitchen on Wilkie Boulevard.  

The cabinets were a sky blue with black hardware.  There was green and blue low pile carpet with a funny little pattern, and we had one of those old dishwashers that you had to pull across the kitchen to attach to the sink faucet.  The counters were white formica with little flecks of gold in them, which made me happy.  We had a wall unit oven and a countertop range in the 1970’s Coppertone shade, which wasn’t quite brown and wasn’t quite orange.  The Pop Tarts lived with the soda, which was only for special occasions, in the cabinet under the counter and the Tastykakes were in the freezer for freshness.  

The coolest part of our kitchen was the counter.  There was a full size section that folded down, but could be raised to double the size.  This is where the magic happened.  Initially, my job was sort of menial.  I had to cut the paper grocery bags (these were the ones that we weren’t using for textbook covers) to create a place for the cookies to cool.  This was a big operation, and we didn’t have a stash of Sur la Table cooling racks up in there.  We were old school.  Crisco was the shortening of choice and each cookie left a ring of greasy goodness on those splayed out paper bags.  Ideally, as they came off the trays, I would arrange them in rows of six, so that we could count our dozens.  If we did a good job, we could use the paper bags a second day.  Economy was important. 

Eventually, my jobs changed.  Soon, I was trusted enough to use the little nut grinder for walnuts.  I loved that gadget, so much so that I built an entire collection of vintage kitchen nut grinders, displayed in my glass front kitchen cabinet on Seaview Avenue.  Finally, I took over the fork for creating the waffle pattern on the top of the peanut butter cookies.  I learned the hard way that if you didn’t coat that fork in flour, you would have a mess.  Now, I have turned that job over to my husband.  His waffle marks are far more symmetrical than mine ever were.  

Once the cookies were cool, we got out our carefully saved pile of last year’s Christmas boxes.  These shirt boxes, emblazoned with the names of local stores, like Steinbach’s, Stainton’s, and the Dolaway Shop would get lined first with heavy duty aluminum foil and then wax paper.  Judy was obsessed with wax paper.  We would layer the cookies in the box, divided by that ubiquitous wax paper and then top them with another piece of heavy foil.  Then, down they would go into the big basement freezer.  

When it came time to arrange them, Judy was the master for many years.  She shopped the after holiday sales for cute Christmas plates and hid them away for the next year.  She lovingly arranged them and covered the plates to give to my teachers and friends.  We loaded them up into our green Mercury Comet or little white Toyota Corolla and hit the road to deliver.  I think handing those cookies to people who were truly thrilled to get them is part of why this pie baking adventure is so satisfying.  I’ve got a history of making people happy through baking.  

An added bonus of these cookies was that if you forgot a gift for someone, a cookie plate would cover your mistake.  Plus, we always had plenty of cookies for holiday parties and, of course, for Santa on Christmas Eve.  

As an adult, I modified the cookie delivery a bit, insisting on monogrammed boxes with matching patterned wax paper, all purchased at a bit of a cost from Williams Sonoma, and tied with a sweet gold bow.  Lots of the cookie recipients remained the same throughout my life, none more special than Mr. and Mrs. Whelan.  You would have thought those cookies and the sweet time visiting were more precious than gold.  Maybe they were.