Holiday Baking: The Wins and the Fails

UK: And supposedly Sylvia Plath used to fill the house with pies and cakes whenever she got writers’ block. We have no need of such excuses to fill the house with cookies. Inspired by selfless motives, we spent last week baking hundreds of cookies and multiple pies in preparation for the holidays.

KK: UK might be thinking it was purely selfless, but I always think of baking for others as an opportunity to eat.  When you make different kinds of cookies, you get to eat different kinds (not like making a batch for yourself, when you’re stuck with 2 dozen of the same kind. Which is terrible.  Really.)

UK: Our Betty Crocker Cooky Book (yes…. “cookies” used to be spelled “cooky” back when Jell-O was king and food coloring was the cat’s pajamas…) has proven invaluable, as has our trusty Joy of Cooking. Unfortunately, neither of them is foolproof.

It all started innocently enough. One day a couple of weeks ago, while yearning to put aside my work for the day and plunge into the joys of domestic bliss, I suggested to KK that we bake a bunch of cookies (cookys?) for Xmas (must be pronounced Ex-mas). Let’s make a variety!

We began mining the cooky book for suggestions. Soon our list extended to six species of cooky. In addition, it seemed like a good idea to make some pies that we had been slavering to eat for the last couple of months but had no good excuse for.

Cooky list:

Gingerbread

Candy cane

M&M (red & green, duh)

Kisses (what we thought would end up coconut macaroons)

Lemon Cheese Spritz

Coconut Cherry Drops

Pie list:

Pumpkin Cheesecake

Coconut Crème Pie

Cherry Pie

The Wins:

Our first “win” was a newcomer, a Betty Crocker recipe: Coconut Cherry Drops. With some trepidation, we had to approach the “fruitcake fixins” section of our grocery store to hunt for candied cherries and the ominous sounding “citron.” Citron just means lemon in French, and on top of that, our first thought was Citron Vodka. Neither of these is helpful in this case. The citron we were looking for was the skin of a tropical fruit of the same name, specially prepared for the Anglo institution of fruitcakes. Our recipe called for it, however, so gosh darn we were gonna get it!

The Coconut Cherry (with Citron) Drops turned out delicious: salty, chewy, just a tad coconutty, with a hint of cherry and citrus. YUM. 

Next were the M&M cookies, which are really just chocolate-chip cookies with red and green M&Ms to make them festive for the Christmas season. Kind of a no-brainer; turned out swell. Ditto for the gingerbread cookies. 

Originally we had planned for macaroons (not the French macaron, the  other one, the coconut one—we like coconut, ok!?), but the Betty recipe for “Kisses” turned out to be meringues with coconut. Never fear, however, they turned out brilliant, and we even learned some new baking techniques for steaming cookies off parchment paper. Wet towels are key!

The Fails:

 It should come as no surprise that the Lemon Cheese Spritz cookys didn’t exactly turn out the way we expected.  We did a crap job checking the ingredients which meant that baking soda was added instead of baking power.  We also don’t have a cookie (cooky?) press, so we add-libbed with our cake-decorating bags. We decided that they might look flower-like, and decided to call them Lemon-Poinsettias in recognition of the season.  Poinsettias are red, so we added red food dye. 

We managed to save the rest of the mix with baking powder, but then we noticed something kind of kooky about our cookys, haha.  Rather than looking like Poinsettias, they looked strangely skin-like.  This was in part because we didn’t add enough red dye (they came out pink), and in part because, squeezed through our cake-decorating tips, they looked, well, fleshy.  That’s right, we made Christmas vaginas (we're calling them roses.) Luckily, all of the vag—I mean ROSES came out tasting great.

The other massive fail were the candy-canes.  I’m going to completely blame Betty on this one, as we were super paranoid about checking and double-checking ingredients after the Christmas Rose fiasco.  The dough had the consistency of semi-dry cement, which should have suggested that it needed something added to it, but rather than doubt Betty, we continued anyway. Every time we rolled the dough, it broke, and there was no way to twist the two colored doughs together into swirls.

We almost scratched the whole batch, but instead we initiated an emergency backup plan to save the dough.  Our plan was to make pinwheels, but it was too crumbly for that too.  We ended up with Christmas Hams, as seen in the picture here (or Christmas Narutomaki, as KK calls them, from traditional Ramen Noodles or Anime films). They taste pretty good.  Thank goodness for almond extract.

The Pies:

What is it with Cardamom?  Why the hell does it cost so damn much?  Anyway, the pumpkin cheesecake was scrumptious.  The cherry was a semi-homemade perfection, with canned cherries improved by cinnamon, nutmeg and almond extract.

The biggest hit was the upstart Coconut Crème Pie Thank You, Joy of Cooking (Cooky-ing?)!

-KK & UK