Behind the Ironic Column

…sugar and butter and cinnamon – what could possibly go wrong with that?  I’ve been making cookies and Christmas candies for more years than I’m going to announce and have tried and rejected many recipes along the way.  If you look at the stack of folders of “things I might want to try sometime” ripped from newspapers and magazines, you could estimate that I could do 5 or 6 new recipes a day and still be chugging along a decade hence.  But this particular recipe is scrawled on the back of an envelope – in my handwriting so it’s something I saw at a friend’s house or the doctor’s office (no, of course I don’t rip pages out of magazines in the waiting room…).  It looks straightforward enough but I don’t remember where I got it or how long ago I wrote it down.  Cinnamon, two kinds of sugar, eggs, butter, flour…classic cookie ingredients.  And it seems to be one of those you mix up and chill, then you can cook it the next day.  Exactly what I want for something to make the place smell like baking without doing much work on Christmas Day.

It claims to make a large number of cookies, so I’m going to cut it in half – should be no problem since the ingredients are easily divisible.  It’s Christmas Eve, I’ve been to a long and interesting movie, and have no commitments other than drinking hot cider and watching “Miracle on 34^th Street” (not the colorized version).  This cookie prep shouldn’t take long and I can relax knowing I’ll have fresh cookies tomorrow.  Since I had remembered to set the butter out before I went to the movie, it’s warmed up to something slightly more malleable than a solid brick. 

After some internal debate about the best course of action, I decided to add the egg and forge ahead.  Then I made the second big mistake (this is a mistake I’ve made before and one I usually guard against).  I added all of the recommended flour mixture … in this instance I believe the proportion of flour was way too high in the recipe itself.  When I later looked up other similar kinds of recipes to check  proportions, the flour in this one seemed excessive.  Plus it seems to have been an extremely dry flour… the whole mixture turned to a dusty consistency.  I could form it into balls but they tended  to disintegrate quickly.  What I’m supposed to do after everything is well blended is to pack the dough into a loaf pan and chill it for several hours or “until firm”.  I can tell from experience that this dough is going to need a miracle to become anything like a sliceable refrigerator cookie dough.  On the other hand, it has butter and eggs and sugar and pecans in it already – and I wasn’t brought up to just toss out expensive ingredients.  Holding out for optimism again,  I packed it into the loaf pan, stashed it in the refrigerator to see what would happen, and added a large shot of whiskey to my hot cider.

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