Christmas Baking

The Christmas concert – which was amazing and brilliant and all things good – is over, huzzah! The weather outside is merely “meh,” and no longer frightful, so we indulged this past week in doing some hardcore baking – all new recipes, some of which were fairly experimental. This makes up for the lack of sweet baking this year: Christmas Cookies for T’s entire choral section, plus selected friends – in all, about twenty-five people, who each received a half dozen to a dozen cookies. As T. prefers not to make cards these days, this is her gift to those she loves.

Perhaps the … most fiddly of the cookie recipes was for Cranberry Pinwheels. Basically, the pinwheel is made up of a modified sugar-cookie dough, a layer of brown sugar and milk slurry, then a layer of chopped almonds, cranberries, and orange zest (leaving a half inch of dough on one end and 3/4 inch of dough on the other end clear of any filling, so that your pinwheel center is very definite, and so your roll stays rolled). The whole mess is then rolled up and stashed in the freezer until thoroughly frozen. Yes, frozen.

When D. first tried to cut the things, he went looking for his cleaver and mallet, they were so solid … but, in about 15 minutes, the roll had started to slump and ooze a bit, and it was time to slice cookies off of the roll as quickly as possible! We’d suggest using a nonstick cutting surface (if you have a Silpat you don’t care about), as the dough really does get quite sticky and if the kitchen is warmed from a pre-heating oven, it can all go to stickiness pretty darned rapidly.

The cookies themselves hardly spread at all – they simply settle. We had to bake them twice, as we’re a bit uncertain of our oven and pulled them too soon the first time. DO let them bake all the way – the sugar turns to caramel and is just wonderful with the cranberries and nuts (D. thinks they could have used far more cranberry, while T. thinks the orange zest was too tame, but were following the recipe for once. Next time it’s no-holds-barred experimentation).

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Of course, no Christmas Cookie bake-off could take place without the requisite sugar cookies and gingerbread men. We picked up a lovely set of circular cookie-cutters last year, and had thought to make wreaths out of the sugar cookies. By the time came to frost them with bows and all, we’d lost a bit of our drive: we went with tinted frosting, sprinkles and dragees. Of course, we didn’t want to use too much color, so the greens for the wreaths were a bit pastel in the reds and greens, and then with the added sprinkles, the wreaths look quite a bit like … donuts. Le Sigh.

The gingerbread men were made using our pre-bitten (ABC) cookie cutters (thank you Sarah). We’d planned to ice those as zombies & then paint the edges of the missing parts with gore, but just never got there either (you can see how this is going). Also, the wonky oven situation meant that half of each pan was over-baked, so some of them are going to be turned into ornaments, or hung out to share with the birds, as they’re just a bit too crunchy to eat. Oh, well – the rest of them are tasty, including the monster one made from the last of the dough (he’s already mostly gone, having been easily dismembered due to how he was constructed).

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At Christmas, naughty children get coal the world over, we understand. In that spirit, we needed to make coal in quantity, because are we not mostly naughty around here? We baked some round coal – really, Chocolate Crinkle cookies – made with real grated 70% dark chocolate, but then thought, Hey, why can’t we make them oddly-shaped, as coal probably is in real life (never having burned the stuff, nor seen it in person really, we used our imagination about what a flammable rock would look like when chipped from the earth)? The Crinkles are a rich, chocolate-butter cookie which is rolled in confectioner’s sugar and supposed to crack and look as if they were slightly charred on the outside but solid black in the cracks. Whether it was because of the stupid oven or the odd shapes, they didn’t crack as much as expected – possibly because we supplemented cocoa powder instead of using all grated chocolate – but they are quite tasty regardless.

And, for that special someone in the bass section who cannot seem to resist pestering T. (he knows who he is), causing her to snicker inappropriately during rehearsals, we whipped up a whole dozen lumps of coal – no other cookies for him, no, not with that behavior (T. remains blameless in all of this). We put to good use a burlap sack of the sort one gets when buying a quantity of rice. Two simple cuts removed the bottom quarter of the bag; T. stitched it up, lined it with a sandwich baggie, and we had the proper bag for coal. (The naughty certainly deserve nothing elegant like a stocking for such a delivery!)

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The good children received mostly pretty cookies (with a few lumps of coal thrown in, because we, of course, KNOW the “good” children). Everyone also received a hunk of peanut/almond brittle, which this time turned out more glassy like a hard candy than opaque like the usual brittle. We’re bewildered by this – we followed the same recipe as last time, but everything came together a bit differently. Was it because we poured directly onto a Silpat placed on the glass-topped table? Was it because we didn’t brush the sides of the pot with oil to prevent the sugar sticking? No idea. It could have been, though, that our fluctuating gas (along with the wonky oven, the hob isn’t all that predictable) actually raised the sugar to a hotter temperature than last time (still can’t find those candy thermometers): we definitely had “hard ball” stage fairly quickly. A single drop of sugar lava, when dripped into a glass of cool water, actually sounded as if we’d dropped a glass bead into the water rather than just a hunk of sugar! Clink. Definitely “hard ball” stage!

A cookie that only J. and Axel’s darling parents – all of whom actually bought tickets to our show without being coerced! (Though we know P. only came for the ABBA sing-along) – received was Cranberry Shortbread. It’s just too easy to OD on sweet desserts this time of year, and so we sought out a recipe for a cookie with a little more subtlety and flavor.

We first cooked down two and a quarter cups of cranberry, three tablespoons of orange juice, and 2/3 cup of sugar. Already you’ll note that’s not a lot of sugar for such sour and bitter berries. While that was boiling down, we made a quick shortbread crust – butter, cornstarch, flour, vanilla, salt — and 1/3 c. of sugar: again, not very sweet at all. When the filling was practically cranberry jelly, cooked down to a thick syrup, we lay it on half the shortbread crust, which had been packed down into the bottom of the pan. We sprinkled the remaining half on the top, and patted it down. A half hour later, we had kind of a …seething, cranberry-lava pie. But, as it cooled, the cornstarch did its job, and the whole thing came together as cookie bars. T. dusted the top with confectioner’s sugar, and sliced the bars into one-inch squares. These bars were really GOOD, and enjoyed by those with sophisticated palettes – and they were consumed before M&P got back to Largs, which makes these bars a Do Again recipe.

All of the cookies were packaged up, tied with ribbon, and set aside with a sigh of relief. The house smelled wonderfully of baking, there wasn’t so much of a mess as we’d anticipated (thanks to the fact that we don’t have as many cooking vessels as we had in California, and actually have to wash them to keep baking new stuff – we got on autopilot, after awhile), ‘though there were quite a lot of sugar-coated utensils, and much sneezing due to powdered sugar. It was a lot of fun, and though T. was really uncomfortable with all of the effusive thanks she received – one girl curtseyed to her for the cookies! Do people our age really not bake!? Or is it more an urban v. suburban thing? – D., at least, enjoyed playing Uncle Christmas and handing out good eats to all. That’s us done with cookies, though, ’til at least Valentine’s Day!

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And now we really must get on with house decorating. J. will be coming to visit at the end of the week, L. will be coming to visit after the new year, also to spend a few days. and then C. will be along to celebrate receiving her marks on her Master’s dissertation and finishing with all of that nonsense. We’re hoping for good weather (READ: No ice, please), so that J. (who is a veterinarian) will get to visit our local flock of sheep, and so that we can take L. up to the castle for some photography. Of course, if it’s “just” raining as usual, we’ll happily wander around in our boots, doing our thing.

For now, we’re snuggled in, enjoying the freedom from schedule and routine and just being home. We’re listening to a lot of orchestral music, jazz, World Music and the like to eradicate songs from Grease, ABBA, Hairspray and carols playing full-time in our heads. So far we’ve been moderately successful – although T. still hums the theme to The Midnight Cowboy from the John Barry tribute occasionally, unable to stop herself (the orchestra did a beautiful job with it; a clarinet played the plaintive harmonica solo. Our show even got a review in the Glasgow Herald, which made us quite proud – and amused; the reviewer said the musical choices were “random.” Hah). Loves of freshly baked whole-wheat bread are on the agenda for either today or tomorrow (we’re still just not able to plug in our ambition just yet), and some stollen — based on Elle’s recipe — is on the agenda for probably Friday morning. And the house will smell like a holiday at home all over again.

Wherever you are, in the far-flung corners of the world, we’re wishing you peace and hoping you’re enjoying some time off from the madding crowd as well.

-D & T