12.09.2007

Christmas Cookie Fiasco

I’m sure that I can thank my mom for my love of Christmas cookies. Every year she would make tin after tin of Christmas cookies. There were Russian Tea Cakes, Pepperkakor, Spritz, Thumb Print cookies and toffee. Any time we left the house in December we would take a platter of cookies to share with friends. Everyone loved them. I love that tradition and every year I have grand plans of delivering tins of delicious cookies to all of my dear friends. There is one small problem. As much as I love baking, I find cookies tedious. There is a lot of clean up and endless trips to the oven. As far as cooking goes I find them very unsatisfying. The thing that amazes me is that I never remember my mom complaining about making all of those cookies.

That being said this weekend I planned on hunkering down and making my cookies to give away. I was going to start off with something easy, Spritz. I love these little buttery almond cookies. I needed to get a cookie press first. Last year I bought two but ended up returning both of them because neither one worked very well. This year I found on that had a better design, but I’m still not convinced. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but they turned out terrible. First the cookies came out of the press unevenly and then they spread out really thin and burned. This is a recipe that I’ve been using for twenty years and this is the first time it’s gone this bad.

I consulted with my Aunt Nancy (one the experts I like to consult with) the next day and she said that her recipe had 2-1/2 C flour where as my recipe only had 2-1/4 C. I think we found the culprit. I’ll try another batch this week and hopefully things will turn out better.

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