cranky hipsta xmas nana
I was watching Ina Garten on TV the other day. She was putting a five-egg/one-pan French country omelet in the oven, happily pointing out that it was a two-person dish. She muttered about making individual omelets, “It’s like having to stand at the stove making pancakes for everyone on the weekend. Ugh.” I smiled knowingly at my kitchen sistah.
It might have been when Mr. Forte and I got married and I made the overnight transition from cooking for two (me and my daughter Amy) to cooking for a battalion – birthday dinners for 25 at least once a month – that I became a big-dish cook. Food in our house is served piled on platters or in big wooden bowls or deep ceramic crocks. “Rustic” shoved “precise” down the garbage disposal ages ago. Desserts are crisps and crostinis, nothing more elegant than a big cake or more individual than a bunch of brownies. Cookies – those time-sucking batches in and out of the oven that I had always made, even when Amy was little, with my teeth clenched – have been stricken from the list. Anyone could tell just by looking at me that I am a pushover for a quick run to Maggie Moo’s for a scoop of rocky road on a sugar cone, but no one calls me Cookie Nana.
Except at Christmas. And now I’ve whittled even that to the truly essential: that crisp, thin cookie that tastes like sugar-sprinkled December, the best rolled sugar cookie in the universe, inspired by Martha Stewart. Her current recipe is called “Ideal Sugar Cookies,” but I’ve been making them from the recipe in her “Martha Stewart’s Christmas” book, published by Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. in 1989.
My Christmas cookies have evolved, a good sport might say. As Martha writes, I too once had a drawer full of cutters – Santas and Christmas trees, geese and snowmen – and the cookies were carefully iced, though not as carefully as Martha’s (if I had plipped all those perfect yellow icing dots on a sheep cookie with a Barbie doll’s eyedropper and someone had then picked it up and aimed it at his mouth … ) . But the biggest fans of my long-ago iced cookies would lift through the tins to find the naked ones that had been in the oven a few minutes too long (Martha shuddered) and gotten brown and (Amy’s word) shattery. Hmmm.
Any recipe for a rolled butter-based cookie will tell you the scraps may be rerolled only twice. That seemed like a waste of dough I was already wishing I hadn’t made in the first place. My cookie-eaters loved to eat the cookies, not look at them, so I tossed the cute cutters for a sharp knife and traded traditional for avant-garde. We now have West Edge Nana MOMA Christmas Cookies: barely decorated, they are the deconstructed essence of the holiday that snap between your teeth and smell of brandy and vanilla sugar. Since life has a way of raining surprises down on your head, last year’s batch inadvertently included a geography lesson. Below is a pictorial rendering of the 2011 Mother of Invention Holiday Bakefest.
Ready to rock and roll
A careful observer will see Delaware, Maryland, Colorado, Wyoming and a miniature Tennessee
Sierra Nevada Mountains – Lake Tahoe
The Hawaiian island chain (not to scale) (and no counting)
California with major population centers in green sugar – San Diego, Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco
Puzzle for next season’s Survivor Immunity Challenge
LZ (landing zone)
Cinnamon red hots for me, not the cookies
* * * * * *
Once the cookies had arrived (chauffeur-driven) in San Francisco, they were taste-tested by Simone, who reported on the rules and results of the recent dreidel contest while eating California.
Posted in: casa de swell, children and grands, human beans, in the kitchen, laughs
Tags: adobe soup, baking, butter cookies, candace mann, christmas, cinnamon red hots, cookies, cooking for an army, dreidel, food, kitchen, martha stewart, san francisco, sugar cookies, sugar sprinkles
What people are saying: 32 Comments
02.15.2012 - 7:48 am
I LOVE the map idea for cookies. And I do love your technique. You’ve rolled them perfectly thin. And now I’m craving Christmas cookies EXACTLY when I shouldn’t, which is now, after all our birthdays (our family are Aquarians…nearly ALL of us), so December, January and February are months of ridiculous excess. And today I was supposed to knuckle under and think salad and treadmill.
Damn Candace! DAMN YOU WOMAN!!
big hug to you my CA bud. Happy New Year.
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 9:24 am
i think all twelve months should be “months of ridiculous excess,” don’t you? why live, after all, if not for that?
i love you monkey and am uber glad to see you here. thanks so much for liking this little piece. XO
02.15.2012 - 7:51 am
Loved the dreidel lesson! What a sweetie. Those cookies look scrumptious too.
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 9:25 am
the cookies are actually amazing, like i bite into one every year and think, wow, damn, those are *so* good. every year. thanks for rolling into the soup, chris!!
02.15.2012 - 9:11 am
I love that no matter how convincingly you lay out the business of skill and chance that she does not, for a second, budge from her original response of *chance*. And that right there — that’s skill. <3
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 9:27 am
our simonio is one sure-of-herself girl. who (no surprise) loves to win. like someone else i know. xoxo
02.15.2012 - 9:38 am
You’re not helping. I want to go bake cookies and big crocks of pork and kraut now! (That’s my big pot food. And chili. And stew…)
Damn it!
Yum!
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 9:48 am
it’s finally raining and cold here. we might actually get two or three days of winter. i’m *all* about big pot food today so thanks for the idea of pork/cabbage – mmmmm – and for stopping in!
02.15.2012 - 11:30 am
Hope to sample those on my trip out next month. Perhaps we could practice making some of the New England states.
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
i’m sure i can do MA. maine might be iffy. can’t wait to see you after all these decades!! how did we ever live this long?
02.15.2012 - 12:12 pm
These are incredible!! I tried the recipe…and wil send you pictures if I can figure it out. There’s something about the “thin-ness” of them that makes me addicted!!! Hey! Should I be thanking you….?
)
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 4:35 pm
you can thank martha. she’s the one who thought of adding brandy, the key ingredient. but thanks for leaving the comment, woman from south africa!
02.15.2012 - 12:28 pm
Doggone it, I just LOVE those cinnamon red hots. My favorite candy! Kindred spirits I guess.
Oh wait, was I supposed to comment on those sugar cookies? Love ‘em, can’t get enough of ‘em. My mom used to cook them throughout the holiday season. A few twists and they’re snickerdoodles. Yum!
I have chicken thawing right now so I can once again make the kitchen smell like my latest experimental soup — chipotle chicken noodle.
Believe me when I tell you; You. Gonna. LOVE it!
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 4:36 pm
be sure to send along the chipotle chicken soup recipe. if i steal it, i’ll be sure to always properly attribute! thanks, dunn!
02.15.2012 - 1:08 pm
I do love making lovely shaped cookies, but indeed, at some point you mast stop rolling that dough! I made a tray at the end of my last batch that also looked suspiciously like the midwest…
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 4:37 pm
the midwest!! now, that’s a freeform sort of it-is-what-you-say-it-is kinda thing, right?! that made me howl. thanks for stopping in.
02.15.2012 - 3:51 pm
I had to tell you, the photo of the dough looked like a cat…your creativity got a head start!
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
you see a cat there? hmmm. artistic eyes, maybe? but i just looked again, and the big Hawaiian island looks like a side view of an iguana. i swear i’m not making this up – my roommate used to have dozens of them. not when she was my roommate, thankfully. thanks, buffy/S!
02.15.2012 - 4:41 pm
“A careful observer will see Delaware, Maryland, Colorado, Wyoming and a miniature Tennessee”
What, no Kansas?
candace Reply:
February 15th, 2012 at 5:01 pm
i almost thought kansas was interchangeable with colorado and/or wyoming, but it has that little hiccupy place on the upper right (aka northeast) corner. if you look veeeerrrry carefully, you will find an exact replica in the LZ photo. big prize for the first one who …
02.15.2012 - 6:51 pm
What a smart little cookie !
02.15.2012 - 10:29 pm
you are a clever one.
if i made these, i would see each less than perfect shape as a’reject’ to be eaten before anybody sees it.
that might be a problem for my hips…
02.16.2012 - 2:32 am
Yeah, well. Call me when you make Pennsylvania. (sniff)
What an adorable kid!
02.16.2012 - 7:15 am
I saw Minnesota right off the bat. Surprised no one else did.
I remember in HS, we had to take some “alternate” elective classes where the girls were forced to take shop classes and the boy were forced to take (what was known as) home economics classes. I learned to make apple pie and the universally enjoyed sugar cookies (but not Martha’s recipe, though I’ll bet brandy would have enhanced them a lot).
So, now you’ve got me hankering for some sugar cookies (maybe topped with red hots – love them!), and Simone has me wondering if I can still spin a dreidel like a pro.
Mazel Tov to all.
02.16.2012 - 3:37 pm
Candice, you are so clever. I miss the days when I used to do all that fancy stuff (sometimes):).
Every holiday was a major event. Now…oh well. I must pass this idea on to my daughter who made dozens of little heart cakes for Valentine’s Day. Kudos to both of you!
02.17.2012 - 10:46 pm
Dammit…Michigan and Florida would have been so easy (once the dough was made, anyway)…now I’m craving cookies…
02.18.2012 - 6:52 am
I can’t bake worth beans. You are a master at cooking and words? I’m impressed!
02.18.2012 - 7:50 am
Thanks for the post – it made this Grandpa smile. I fell in love with Simone and her Dreidel, she reminds me of my stepson when he was about her age. We played chess and tennis, he was thirteen or fourteen before he beat me on the court and less than a year later he finally managed to maneuver me into checkmate. He triumphant victory dances were legendary.
Old Man on the Mountain
02.18.2012 - 8:11 am
Candace, this cracked me up! Big crowd cooking is much more satisfying than the type of delicate precision I admire when I go out to eat. And now you’ve given me a great cookie idea for next holiday season.
02.20.2012 - 11:49 am
hey, everybody – thanks for all the funny/wise/cool comments. sorry for the calories that got stuffed in your jeans.
i’ve been cranking out words in other places but will be back here in a flash – well, not exactly a flash but perhaps a sparkler – with more stuff. this place needs more soup!
peace
candace
03.12.2012 - 9:16 pm
Have you never heard of a perfectly square cookie? Or, better yet, have you forgotten the cookie lady in La Jolla? Or the absolutely fantabulous cookies at Jamie’s wedding? Your baking challenged friend. V.
candace Reply:
March 14th, 2012 at 10:40 pm
hey, vic. my square cookies weren’t perfect, but i think that was sort of the point. or at least the all-too-expected outcome. i do remember when the cookie lady’s store got burned to the ground, a terrible day. and i never *got* a cookie at jamie’s wedding – someone (!) decided we were leaving before dessert.
that mr. forte, he’s a bummer sometimes.