Double delicious

I am stuffed. Full of smiles that make your cheeks ache, and endless hugs--the solid kind that last long enough to synchronize breathing--of laughter, of touches, of love. And then there was the potluck table, groaning under the weight of multiple and tasty savories and sweets, all washed down with wine produced by one of ourown, followed by s'mores at the fire pit late into the evening, and a hearty brunch the next day.

It was a reunion, of family of a sort: 30-some odd years ago, we were young theatre students, so sure of ourselves and so incredibly unsure of ourselves, trying on new personas and discovering who we might turn out to be. Some still work in the industry, many do not, but all agree that they use their degree (or near degree) every day of their life. And all have turned into lovely people I am just tickled to be able to count as friends.

With all the missteps and misunderstandings of our youth behind us, we could truly appreciate and enjoy each other, and we did so joyfully as we devoured the food and each others' tales. And so I offer you these special cookies from a very special  place--my heart.

Giant Toffee Chocolate Cookies

makes about 18

1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1 lb. bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, chopped
1/4 cup butter

1 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
4 large eggs
1 tbl vanilla extract
8 oz. chocolate-covered toffee, coarsely chopped
1 cup walnuts, toasted, chopped

Combine flour, baking powder and salt in a small bowl; whisk to blend. Melt chocolate and butter together in a double boiler set over simmering water until smooth. Remove from water and cool mixture to lukewarm.

Using an electric mixer or food processor, beat sugar and eggs together until thick. Beat in chocolate mixture and vanilla. Stir in flour mixture, then toffee and nuts. Chill batter until firm, about 45 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line two large baking sheets with parchment paper or a silicone mat. Drop batter by 1/4 cupfuls onto sheets, spacing 2 1/2 inches apart. Bake just until tops are dry and cracked but cookies are still soft to the touch, about 15 minutes. If baked cookies are misshapen from escaping toffee, use a spatula to coax the still-hot cookies back into shape. Cool on baking sheets. Share with friends.

If you give a kid a cookie

Have you ever watched a kid eat a cookie? First, they take a little nibble, but since the arc of the cookie's diameter and the arc of their mouth work in opposition, the little corners of the bite out of the cookie break off and scatter down the front of their shirt. (Note: they stick better to sweaters, the fuzzier, the better.) The next bite is where life experience makes all the difference: an adult would turn the cookie and go for one of the protruding points. Not the kid. They pick up where they left off, jamming the cookie farther in, which means lots more crumbs (and even more if the cookie is gluten-free). If it’s a chocolate chip cookie, this is where the first smudge of chocolate on the side of their mouth comes from. (An aside: they apply the same methodology to watermelon, which explains how they get so incredibly sticky.) A really young child will continue in this way until the cookie snaps in two and they have to scramble for the crumbs, or cry because their cookie broke.

This only applies to homemade cookies, since they’re “more better than store cookies,” a direct quote from my Little One. His classmate today declared that “store soup” wasn’t nearly as good as “home soup” but she was going to eat it anyway ‘cause she was hungry. I hope her dad has some time to make “home cookies” today like Little One’s mom did. There’s just nothing more better than a homemade, crumbly, chocolately smile.

Gluten-Free Chocolate Chip Cookies

Cream together:
½ cup butter or shortening
¼ cup granulated sugar
¾ cup brown sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 egg (or use egg replacer)

Add gradually:
1½ cups GF flour (I use rice/starch based)
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon xanthan gum

That’s the basic cookie. Now you can add the stuff that makes it interesting, like 1 cup of chocolate chips, or coated chocolate candies, or toffee bits, or nuts, or…?

Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 12 minutes or until golden. Do not overbake. Makes about 4 dozen 3” cookies.

One yogurt

British Neighbor called yesterday as her kids were eating breakfast (mid morning, yet another snow day). She was trying to sort out a very American-sounding recipe: M&M cookies. It called for 1½ sticks of softened butter, and she and her daughter were scratching their heads. Her daughter was guessing that it meant one and a half boxes, but that would have resulted in buttery puddles on the baking sheet: the recipe was referring to 1½ of the four "sticks" that are individually wrapped in the one-pound package typically sold in the US. Armed with that vital bit of information, we were treated to some lovely, buttery cookies after our first snowball fight of the day.

So much depends on packaging that we often forget this when submitting recipes across borders. A quick Google search shows many people, from Australia to Germany, asking the same "stick of butter" question, with at least one poor soul confused by a request for a tablespoon of chilled butter, noting that when it's chilled, it's extremely difficult to force into a spoon, you see. When you buy your butter in a block like the rest of the world, there are no handy tablespoon markings on the package!

I ran across this the first time I was tempted by a foreign recipe. It was an elegant-sounding saffron cake I found in a French woman's magazine while I was still in college here. But I was confused by the ingredient "one yogurt." I was petrified, on my student budget, of making a mistake with my expensive saffron by putting in the wrong amount of yogurt. It's just as well, since I also didn't realize that French yogurt was an entirely different creature from the gelled stuff you get in American supermarkets. And no, I've never made the recipe: I have spent literally an hour in a French hypermarché looking at the different sizes, and can find no standard. I remain stymied--but I still have the recipe in my files!

This bit me again this year, when I tried to make marzipan crescents amidst the Christmas baking madness (you can read the sad tale here). The recipe called for "½ Fläschchen Bittermandelöl" (½ vial of bitter almond oil). I knew I didn't have anything like that in my cupboard, and I couldn't recall ever seeing it in a store. I turned to the Internet, both to find out what it was and how much a ½ fläschchen was. Luckily for me, the Germans are big on standardization: I learned the Dr. Oetker product was an almond flavoring based on oil and the vial contained about ½ teaspoon of it. Wonder of wonders, I also learned that ¼ teaspoon of the Bittermandelöl corresponded roughly to one teaspoon of what we call almond extract. Which was exactly what I needed to make the cookies.

Christmas eve

We started off, quite festively, with champagne at the neighbors, enjoying conversation, playing music together, and then playing murders until at the bottom of bottle four, we reached a lull where kids were hungry enough to bring home for supper. After that much champagne, I was quite pleased that I had had the presence of mind to skin the salmon filet before we went over.
I put the water on under the potatoes, then we popped over to the other neighbors for the annual exchange of cookies: I offer up Vanillekipferl, Zimtsterne and Lebkuchen, she reciprocates with her Swedish cookies: Pepperkakkor, Krumkake and Spritz. We have two Christmas-y trays that the cookies go on, and they move back and forth between our houses yearly.
Once the cookie exchange was accomplished, along with the usual catch-up on offspring/girlfriends/niece, we headed home and put on the salmon. I was thinking a nut crust and some pretty fresh cranberries would make for a nice counterpoint to the buttery flesh, but apparently the acid of the cranberries reacted with the carbon steel of my pan, and the juices turned out a grubby grey. Luckily, there was no metallic taste, and it looked worse in the kitchen than by candlelight on the table. The potatoes did the buttery melting thing, with herb salt, and lemon juice gave the steamed broccoli the perfect tang. A lamb's lettuce salad with a lemon-herb dressing made for an elegant but festive supper on a busy evening.
We only managed one of the cheesecakes this evening, but there are enough leftovers that we can resume more scientific testing tomorrow.

Heimweh

When I took German 101 at the community college to prepare for life with my new-found love, the teacher showed a film that we all found hilarious. One scene in particular prompted riotous laughter: a woman filling an immense tin--really the size of a carry-on suitcase--with Christmas cookies. I mean nobody bakes that much, right?

Fast forward twenty years: I bake German Christmas cookies this time of year, since I now understand the wistful feeling that true Germans get this time of year, and how well their favorite cookie helps allay this angst. And, so help me, I even have a huge tin, courtesy of my Nuremberg-dwelling sister-in-law, who in true Swabian (read skinflint) fashion, buys them factory direct, and sends huge packages via DHL. It appears that cookies in quantity make homesick Germans feel better.

My husband's favorite are Vanillekipferl, little melt-in-your-mouth vanilla crescents, made with butter, egg yolks, ground almonds and a token amount of flour, then dredged in vanilla bean-scented powdered sugar. Their companion cookie is Zimtsterne, cinnamon stars, since they use the egg whites. They're essentially nut meringues, cut into six-pointed star shapes and dried in a slow oven. These, it turns out, are the favorite of our exchange student.

This year presents the wheat/egg/dairy free challenge. Rather than start by adapting recipes, I hit the Internet, looking for German gluten free (GF) sites. Bingo! My hunch was right: even Germans with health issues were not going to do without their Christmas cookies! The Vanillekipferl turned out lovely without eggs and flour (I don't consider butter dairy, since it's pure fat). There were other surprises: I didn't expect much of Elisenlebkuchen, those delicately chewy gingerbread made with honey, orange peel and ground almonds, but they turned out to be the best of the bunch, chewy and tart with their lemon icing. But I thought Marzipanhoernchen would behave, since they're mostly marzipan with a few eggs to bind. Clearly egg replacer doesn't make the grade on these: they absolutely lost their shape. I saved them by slicing the thin, bubbling mess into squares before it cooled, then drizzled the squares with chocolate (no sense wasting all that marzipan!). I can always pretend I intended them to come out that way.

It does help to think out of the box, even--or especially--when dealing with tradition. One hot August day back in our student days in Freiburg, I went into the community kitchen in our dorm to bake up some chocolate chip cookies. I was writing my thesis, and really needed some of those gooey bundles of home (together with a tall glass of cold milk) to feed my muse. In waltzed a fellow student (pre-law), asking what I was doing. When I told him I was baking cookies, he looked puzzled, then alarmed, and stated with Teutonic authority, "but it's not December!"
Nope, they're not the way Oma made them, but they're just right for right now.