I want to apologize in advance for the lack of sensational food photography. It’s just that my camera sucks. It’s more than three years old and it shows. You just can’t take any good food pictures with it and I kind of gave up trying too hard. We’ve been talking about getting a kick-ass new camera (a Nikon D50 is what I have in mind), but that’s on a list together with a new couch, a MacBook, a shiny mandoline and a fancy pink KitchenAid, so there’s no way of telling when we’ll actually have one.
Anyway, I think that the season of cookie baking has officially begun, don’t you agree? Humble me, for instance, has already spiced up the air with smells of freshly baked cookies twice this month, and I’m usually not an avid cookie baker, so that has to mean something.
The godmother of all pre-Christmas cookie baking is my mother, though. For as long as I remember her cookies has been a part of the weeks before Christmas and she is the one in my family to both consult for cookie advice and to just beg for one more bag of cookies, please. She’s also the reason I have a cookie trauma, which I constantly remind her of half-jokingly.
To understand the cookie trauma you’ll need to know that my mother was the youngest of nine children, so when it was Christmas time and there were cookies to be baked, my grandmother never really cared for beauty. With nine children the quantity kind of overruled the quality. There were bits missing from cut-out cookies and other irregularities, since understandably my grandmother didn’t have the time it takes to make perfectly pretty cookies.
My mother though did. With only one child (and a low maintenance one, I’d like to add) to raise and her very own cookie trauma to tend to, she became the very Master of the Perfect Cookie. Her Zimtsterne (cinnamon stars), Vanillekipferl, Nusspangani and whatnots look perfect. This of course made her pretty unfit for enduring a child involved in the baking process. A child (even a low maintenance one) doesn’t quite get the concept of only kneading the dough until it’s done. Children tend to overknead. They also tend to sprinkle about more flour than needed. In general they tend to not respect or even grasp the Importance of Baking Perfect Cookies. They do tend to get the Importance of Eating Cookie Dough Before It’s Baked though. At least I know I did. Still do, as a matter of fact.
Can you imagine how hard it is to live up to this big role model who has been there all my life and slowly injected me with the idea that cookies have to be perfect. And pretty. And tasty. It’s not easy, I can tell you that.
So, I chose the way that worked for me, going for completely different recipes, sometimes recipes that guaranteed the unperfectness of the cookie, because unperfect was half of what the cookie was about. I still adore my mother’s cookies. There’s just no way not to. And that is why I’ll try to bring to you some of her and my favorite cookie recipes. If I can snatch some from her, that is. I will even try to take some photos, though, as I already mentioned, I cannot really promise that they’ll turn out great.