The Christmas Cookies Begin!

Christmas Cookies! Few things evoke the nostalgia of the Advent season like the baking of Christmas Cookies. There is something magical about spending a quiet afternoon indoors, while the weather outside fulfills its seasonally appropriate frightfulness, listening to the Julie Andrews, Bing Crosby and the Vienna Boys Choir in their original vinyl glory on the gramophone, while individually sized packets of joyful superfluity come golden brown (or dark brown as the case may be) in dozens from the oven. Ah, the sounds of children being extra good lest St. Nicholas pass them by; the scents of clove, cinnamon, chocolate and vanilla; the leisurely enjoyment of the spiced chai with a splash of eggnog and rum (I do recommend this).

Or you can bake Christmas cookies like we usually do, a batch here, a batch there, in between violin recitals, homeschooling, defusing quarrels, wiping noses and butts, driving over to the farm to do chores, and trying not to trip on the pile of colored pencils and pretty pictures on the kitchen floor.

We decided to make Biberli first this year. It is a traditional Swiss cookie that famously gets tastier and tastier the longer it sits, so we want it to sit for at least three weeks before Christmas.

First we zest two small oranges and a regular sized lemon. Then we stick an orange each on the finger of the small helpers. Apparently, according to them, this is an essential part of the process. No one knows why or what would happen if we didn’t do it. Best not to find out.

Then, while a grownup melts 2 1/2 cups of honey, 2 cups of sugar and 1 cup of milk over the stove, your least irresponsible helper whisks together 8 cups of flour, 1 tsp salt, 2 tbs cinnamon, 2tsp ground cloves, 1 tsp nutmeg, 1tsp cardamom (we go through a lot of that around here. Our Mommy is so young looking, she always gets carded 😉

Of course there is always the likelihood that he will whisk half the mixture out of the bowl and all over the counter. We believe this is a whisk worth taking. Try not to supervise the minions so close that the honey/milk/sugar mixture boils. I’m not sure we are quite ready live in a land flowing with milk and honey.

Then we mix the warm wet ingredients with the cold dry ingredients, and we get a thoroughly unmanageable, sticky brown dough. The directions say to roll it out still warm on a “well-floured” surface. Well, when you think it’s well floured, add some more flour, it’ll still stick.

Make sure you have someone ready and willing to taste the dough at this point. If it doesn’t taste quite right there is literally nothing you can do about it, so you would have to eat it all and start over.

It is at this point that you realize that though you thought you had almond paste leftover that you didn’t use last year, in fact you do not. Time to interrupt Math (always a dangerous proposition) for an emergency trip to the grocery for almond paste.

Upon your return, have your helpers roll the almond paste into “snakes” while you separate two eggs. Only separate two eggs. Two eggs are plenty. Don’t do three for that would be superfluous. If you separate four eggs you have done a Very Foolish Thing and you deserve what you get.

What you get is a soupy mess. Just saying.

There are several ways to proceed from here. The directions say to cut the dough in half and sort of sandwich the snakes of almond paste between the halves. This dough was too big, too heavy, and most of all, too sticky after sitting there for over an hour while we searched high and low for almond paste and then ran to the store for some, then got gas in the car because we were out anyway and reward points. It was not going to come up from that counter top. So what we did was to set each snake about an inch from the edge of the dough, roll the edge carefully over the snake, peeling it up with the spatula as we went, and then patting it down. This formed a strip of dough, almond paste, cookie dough sandwich. We cut this strip away from the main dough, then cut it into chunks, and set them on the parchment paper line pan.

Bake at 350 for 15 minutes.

This is the part where we would glaze them with lemon glaze, if we had remembered to do this, but as they were coming out I was busy trying to ward off the hungry velociraptors so it slipped my mind. Better luck next year.

And just like that….

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas. If our noses weren’t so stuffed it would no doubt smell like Christmas too.

After they are all cooled, we placed them in a cookie tin for storage.

As the Good Book says, “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low.” What that means, properly interpreted, is that every layer of cookies in the cookie tin should be as flat and smooth as possible.

Ellie: “Oh really? Is that what it means?”

Me: “Properly interpreted.”

107 Biberli’s put away for Christmas. Four left out for the ragamuffins to sample for desert (after they eat their soup, Mua-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!)