By Sue Murphy
There’s a sign in my laundry room that says, “Today, I will try to live in the moment, unless it’s unpleasant and then I will eat a cookie.” I’ve eaten a lot of cookies this year. But now, me lovelies, it is officially cookie season, when it would be positively (negatively?) unsociable to leave a macaroon just sitting there on your plate.
My must-do Christmas cookie list is short but critical. If I get to Christmas Eve and there are no spritz sitting expectantly on the cookie platter, I will be forced to substitute Oreos or Mallomars, which wouldn’t be the end of the world, but spritz are just soooo much better.
It’s a simple recipe: butter and flour and sugar and vanilla, and thank goodness, the stores still have all those things in stock. Just before Halloween, there was an empty space where the canned pumpkin should have been, which sent me into a bit of a panic, but it all worked out.
I have everything I need, plus sprinkles. Actually, red and green sprinkles are just as important as the butter, and it was the one thing that I could not procure until we at least got past Halloween. I suppose the spritz would taste the same with orange and black sprinkles, a more “The Nightmare Before Christmas” approach, but this is not the year to go off-roading, as far as I’m concerned.
Before the sprinkling, of course, I have to make the dough. Technically, I don’t have to make dough. I could purchase really terrific cookies from the bakery, but there’s something about preheating the oven and hauling out the cookie sheets that makes it seem like the holidays are actually here. If I don’t end up with a little flour on the dog, it’s just not Christmas.
The dough must be extruded through a cookie press, a wonderful device that turns a wad of dough into Christmas trees and wreaths. Sadly, this year it will only be wreaths as the tree disk met with an unfortunate accident. User error, to be sure. Even though the cookie press has no engine and no clutch, it is still a machine and you know my record with anything mechanical.
With one daughter now living in town, it will be a double-batch spritz year for sure. Both of my girls can make spritz on their own, and have, along with other taste sensations. My Florida daughter is a peppermint cupcake superstar, but this pandemic mess has made it unlikely that I will get to taste one this year. I’ll have to seek out a scratch-and-sniff sticker to get me through. My California-now-Birmingham daughter has been tearing it up in the kitchen of late and is working on a chocolate raspberry cookie that she lovingly refers to as the Katrina Lurkenkranzer.
Because Starbucks has opted NOT to offer its gingerbread loaf this year (we’re currently not speaking), I’ll throw in a batch or two of gingerbread cookies, not just because they taste delicious but because they make the house smell delicious. When I open the oven door, the house is filled with the scent of cinnamon and ginger and cloves, that magical mix that every holiday candle and air freshener tries to capture and fails.
This year, I hope your own home is filled with the magical cinnamon and ginger and cloves. I hope you get flour on your dog. I hope that you joyously indulge in a cookie or three or four, whatever it takes to jumpstart your merry. No cookies? That would be positively (negatively?) unsociable.
