Another Day in the Country
Christmas cookies
© Another Day in the Country
My sister loves baking desserts. She’s been busy making coffee cakes for her workmates at the county health department and cookies for half of our neighborhood in Ramona.
She’s been using so much sugar and flour that there are ruts in the road between her house and the food store. (I’m exaggerating just a wee bit for emphasis.)
Cookie baking always has been one of our Christmas traditions in Ramona. One year we made so many cookies that I memorialized them in an original Shutterfly cookie cookbook. That book has become our cookie Bible.
Even though I wasn’t in the mood for baking, I paged through the recipe book the other day and saw pictures of Ramona kids (now adults with children) also memorialized in the cookbook. Those were the days!
This year, while Jess was experimenting with new cookie recipes, I made one batch of my favorite anise cookies. I use a dog-bone shaped cookie cutter, so I call them “bones.” They are the kind of cookie that is good for dunking.
I took most of them with me to California for Thanksgiving.
“Those are not for the dog,” I joked to Jana, but she already knew what they were, and she likes them as much as I do.
I think they are an acquired taste.
I was having trouble getting inspired to make more cookies. After all, I had a steady supply of sample treats coming from my sister’s kitchen.
“Here’s my latest,” she’d say, bringing a mint-flavored brownie to my table.
Jess says she is happiest when she’s in the kitchen baking, with a good supply of fancy boxes and paper plates, cellophane wrap, and ribbons on the table in the dining room so she can wrap her baking confections up beautifully for presentation to whomever is lucky enough to get one of her offerings.
We often go to coffee with friends at a small restaurant in Abilene, where if we’re lucky they might have fresh cinnamon rolls coming out of the oven.
Our friend Dennis loves raisins in his cinnamon rolls, and since the restaurant’s cook leaves her rolls plain, he brings his own little bag of raisins to poke between the cracks before enjoying his freshly baked treat.
I like raisins in my oatmeal, but I don’t usually put them in cinnamon rolls — just brown sugar and nuts for me.
I don’t make a lot of cookies, so I seldom use raisins there either. Then I remembered that Grandma Ehrhardt used to make raisin cream cookies and send them to us in the mail at Christmastime. They were delicious!
“Wow, I haven’t had those in ages,” I said to my sister as we were driving home.
“Do you even have the recipe?” she wanted to know.
I did.
When I got home, I looked up the recipe. There was a reason I hadn’t made them often. I thought they were too much work since they are double-layered sugar cookies with a raisin filling. But, hey, what else did I have to do on the day before Christmas?
So, I embarked:
Grandma Ehrhardt’s raisin cream cookies
(She used cream in everything.)
½ cup butter
2 cups sugar
2 eggs
1 cup thick cream
1 teaspoon cream of tartar
1 teaspoon soda
1 teaspoon vanilla
4½ cups flour
A little salt.
“You may need to add more flour than called for,” she warned. “You want the dough to be soft, though.”
Roll the dough out between pieces of parchment paper ¼-inch thick.
Cut rounds, put a tablespoon of raisin filling on the bottom round, cover it with a second one, seal the edges, and bake until lightly brown in a 350-degree oven.
Then I dusted them with powdered sugar.
The raisin filling consists of a cup of raisins heated in ¾ cup of water, simmered to soften raisins and “thickened,” as Grandma put it.
She figured I was smart enough to know how to thicken something properly with corn starch. She also suggested adding a teaspoon of sugar and a little salt to the raisin mixture..
Grandma seldom had written-out recipes. When I’d ask her about something she’d cooked, she’d always have to make a special effort to write down all the exact amounts of ingredients. She was just one of those instinctive cooks.
As I mixed up the cookie batter and had to add more flour and then more again, I could see Grandma’s hands, crooked from arthritis for as long as I’d known her, mixing cookie batter in her kitchen with me watching.
It doesn’t really seem all that long ago that she and I were spending another day in the country in her farmhouse kitchen.
Time flies, so enjoy every minute. Happy New Year to you all!