Conquering the Christmas cookie challenge
You know those annoying people who manage to bake thousands of cookies over the holidays with seemingly little effort?
This year, a dream came true for me: I became one of those annoying people.
I didn’t plan to go all Keebler elf. I had no baking schedule, no stockpile of ingredients, no preselected recipes. I was inspired by a tip from a perky blogger who shared a cookie recipe I liked, and that launched me into a nearly constant cycle of cookie baking in December.
The recipe was preceded by an 18,000-word introduction on the blogger’s family history dating back to the Norman Conquest, eventually describing how the recipe was handed down from the blogger’s Aunt Betty (just a neighbor, really, but such a sweet lady). It then went on to explain each ingredient, presumably for bakers who had never heard of all-purpose flour or salt.
I was on day three of reading the recipe intro when the blogger dropped this advice: Leave a pound or two of butter on the counter all month. Then, she said, should the urge to “cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy” come over me, I could act on it without having to wait for the butter to soften. That hourlong process is 54 minutes longer than my attention span. It was like she knew me.
Once I adopted the soft butter trick, it all clicked. I started making dough in the evenings, sticking it in the fridge and then baking the cookies in the mornings while I waited for my coffee to brew.
I never thought I had it in me to become a high-output cookie baker, given how much I dislike, well, baking cookies. I am more the “spread batter in prepared pan” type than the “drop dough by teaspoonfuls” type. Standing in front of the oven swapping out trays of cookies every nine to 11 minutes is fiddly work compared to, say, making brownies: one pan, a half hour, done.
“I don’t want to bake, or even look at, another cookie for the next 11 months. ”
Yet here I was, all December, not just scooping out teaspoonfuls of cookie dough but also forming balls that I then coated in sugar. Sometimes I even rolled out dough and cut it into fanciful shapes. By doing most of the work in a pre-caffeine half-slumber, I hardly dwelled on the drudgery of portioning out up to 128 chunks of dough two inches apart. If I thought, “This could have been a bar cookie,” I never said it out loud.
Over a few weeks, I made dozens and dozens of cookies. While I loved having a variety set out on the table for visitors, I did not love having to walk by them multiple times a day and resist the urge to grab one, or five.
I had the willpower to pass up the generic sugar cookies but not the rugelach, with their soft, buttery dough and fragrant filling of crushed pecans, raisins, and cinnamon. (I am looking into an offsite rugelach storage unit for next year to save me from my gluttony-induced indigestion.)
Unlike me, Mark didn’t assign any guilt or calorie counts to the cookies or attempt to avoid direct eye contact with the kitchen table. He also couldn’t understand why I put out all those cookies and then (a) tried not to eat them and (b) yelled at him when he did.
“They’re bad for you,” I told him, as I arranged concentric circles of molasses cookies, still warm from the oven, on a platter. Nothing says love like encouraging those you care about to overindulge and then chiding them for doing so.
To save up a supply of cookies to give away, I had to stop us from eating them as fast as I baked them. So I hid them everywhere—in the pantry, in the freezer, in my cheek pouches. Given my memory, which is even flakier than my rugelach dough (ha), I expect to be discovering random Ziploc bags full of cookies well into spring.
This holiday baking frenzy was fun, but I’m glad it’s over. I don’t want to bake, or even look at, another cookie for the next 11 months. I’ve rolled up the parchment paper, stashed the cooling racks, and given away the last of the cookies. It’s like it never happened.
In fact, if it weren’t for the fine layer of confectioner’s sugar dust that has settled throughout the house, you’d never know I had baked a single cookie.
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(Originally published in the Addison Independent December 2024)
