mrissa | FEAR OUR MIGHT, PUNY MORTALS. Ahem. I mean, happy holidays!

I am in awe of the baking industry displayed here.

I adore freshly-made cookies of almost all types, but I never manage to overcome my own natural inertia to make them. (Please see sentence 1.)

Holly jollity is not something that just happens! You must work for it! Work and burn your finger and run out of at least one thing you totally thought you had bought just last week!

That is so Scandinavian it makes me smile from the sheer joy of it.

I got up at half past five this morning to make some chocolate brownies, roughly improvised from the maple brownie recipe because I have no walnuts, for

rysmiel to take to the work party today. I ate the broken one. They're pretty good.

We call those "rejects." You have to eat the rejects! You couldn't foist sub-standardly shaped brownies upon other people! It's a humanitarian mission!

But we're right.

I'm planning to do my baking next week, because really, until I'm up to my wrists in flour and dough and whatnot, it's not really Christmas.

I'll look for a full report on you and your mother's adventures in baking!

Will do.

I was going to tell people that they should remember that the baking had to stop at 4:30 when Virginia got here. And then I remembered: duh, it's Virginia! On the

mrissa's Most Scandosotan Friends Ever list (possibly tied with

hypatia_j for #1, even!). So if it gets to be 4:15 and we're saying, "Do we have time to do the brun brods?", of course we'll do them, because Virginia will totally not mind if she walks into the middle of half-baked brun brods.

you are making me want to bake. i just don't have the a) ingredients or b) skill. i'm a really good cook, but a really bad baker.

what are you going to do with all this stuff?

Wait, are there people in the world who object to arriving in the middle of baking?

Hmmm; well, if I was expecting to pick the baker up and head off to an event with a fixed start time, I might. Depending on what was being baked, naturally.

Time to start practicing!

Brownies, chocolate chip cookies, shortbread, biscuits: all things where the basic versions are excellent and completely within reach of a beginning baker.

If you've practiced your bad bakiness to the point where it's a fully internalized skill, I'm not so sure how to escape that.

nah, it's not that bad. :) i actually make good mexican brownies and espresso brownies, and mostly bad cookies. also can't do pie crusts, but can do scratch cake. so i guess it's One Of Those Things.

When my in-laws are doing Christmas cookies, there's always a small amount of dough that can't make an entire cookie (or won't go through the cookie press or whatever). Thus the Traditional Christmas Worm was born.

Eat it, and give it to friends and family members to eat.

I kind of thought that was obvious; even purely decorative gingerbread creations don't sit well with me. (It is gingerbread. You are supposed to eat it.)

Do you remember whether there's a consistent way in which your cookies are bad?

Mine are generally planets. I have a sun cookie cutter, and a moon and a star and a shooting star. So if I have a small amount of dough, I roll it into a ball, thump it with my fist, and declare it a planet, or a planetesimal, depending.

Not if you plan your cookie baking like a military operation and calculate how much you will need with spreadsheets, or else many tiny slips of paper and five cookbooks held open with fruit across the kitchen table, and also it helps if you buy Penzey's vanilla by the pint.

We do plan our cookie baking like a military operation! It's just that it's the kind of military operation that involved dumping as many dried fish, willing Vikings, and casks of mead as one could find in a boat and setting out across the North Sea.

Mostly we end up with enough dried fish.

ah, i should have been more specific :) whether you were going to keep it in the family/house, wrap it up and send it across the country, serve it at parties, freeze some till march ...

re: cookies: they don't seem to have the right consistency; the batter falls down around the chocolate chips or whatever (raisins, etc.). they don't rise, even a little bit. and they often burn onto the cookie sheet even if i grease.

i haven't tried in so long that it's hard to remember. we mostly stick with the refrigerated dough rolls.

and don't even talk to me about cut cookies. there's no place to roll the dough, it inevitably gets stuck to the rolling pin and the cutters, and the shapes are indistinguishable; and then the edges burn.

cookie TRAUMA!

For point two, I recommend more flour and/or chilling the dough. Chilling the dough is something I only learned about in the last handful of years and it's very exciting! I mean, not for cookies that require it, obviously. But chocolate chip cookies are totally different if the dough sits in the fridge for a few hours.

Probably not much sending cross-country this year, alas. I'm not up for standing in lines at the postal orifice, and I don't really want to ask my mom to do much more of that.

Possible problem one: are you using oleo where butter is called for?
Possible problem two: are your leavening agents stale?
Possible problem three: are you baking with warm dough?
Possible problem four: are you attempting to bake cut-out cookies in the Bay Area?

Seriously, cut-out cookies were horrible for me in the Bay Area. I thought I was the world's worst cut-out cookie baker ever. I could flour the living hell out of the kitchen table and the rolling pin and still end up with a sticky, horrible mess. I moved home, and presto! all my recipes worked beautifully.

So are pie crusts, as a friend of mine learned when she tried to follow my instructions but omitted the refrigerator rest.

I suspect that my issues with baking are primarily because I did most of my formative baking experiments in a rain forest. I really should retry a number of those experiments up here where the humidity is occasionally less than 100%.

But I make traditional German cut-out cookies, as does John, every year and they turn out fine here in the Bay Area. It's necessary to refrigerate the dough, though.

I won't be baking for a week or so, thanks to last night's cheesecake disaster. But I am thinking fondly of John's family mandelrohr recipe right now.

That's a bit puzzling. Cookies are often pretty darned simple (though the only one I make is a two-day process and has *very* critical baking requirements). Well, if you can get brownies and actual cakes to work, I'm pretty confident you could learn cookies and bread and things if you decided to work on them for a bit.

I haven't baked in a decade or so (I've got Pamela around, after all), but my few tries at pie crust produced usable containers for meat pies (not in pie plates; baked on sheets, to be eaten out of hand, so there were some structural requirements as well as the culinary ones). *Elegant* pie crust is I'm sure harder; I've never tried for that. Huh; those meat pies were in a house I sold when I moved to MA in 1981, so quite a while ago now.

Yah, but I do wonder whether the recipes are slightly different for the climate.

I'm wondering if we're seeing people not guessing 7 because of the "lucky number 7/always guess 7" thing, because there's a great big dent in the middle of my bell curve.

Christmas baking and candy making start tomorrow for me. I'm going to try your Lussekatter recipe, btw.

I hope you enjoy them! Mine are rising now.

Today I made 2 kinds of cookies, 1 kind of truffle, applesauce, and 2 loaves of brandy apricot bread. Tomorrow I'll make pumpkin bread, applesauce cake, white mini cupcakes, cider buttercream, and 3 kinds of cookies. Sunday I will make chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and anything else there's time for before the tree decorating party 2-6pm. And frost the white cupcakes with the cider butter cream.

Or maybe yellow mini cupcakes would be better.

MKK

I didn't buy enough butter and cardamom so back to the store tomorrow. I think I'll get some lavender too to make lavender shortbread because I just realized my cookes are all spice cookies...
MKK

Variety is sometimes the non-spice of life, too.

If I was coming, yellow mini-cupcakes would be better, but I'm not, so you must deal with the people you're actually feeding. I know that lots of people love white cake, and the cider buttercream certainly sounds like it'd be a great twist.

tanac's apple cider caramels arrived here this week. NOMNOMNOM. Recommended to all who are interested (http://www.sugarpunkdesserts.com/).

FEAR OUR MIGHT, PUNY MORTALS. Ahem. I mean, happy holidays!

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