Happy Holidays.?!

Can it be that Christmas is less than two weeks away?  The season is moving swiftly and I can’t seem to get a hold of it.   Everyday I look at the calendar (and the to do list staring me in the face) and wonder if it’s always like this?  The answer is yes, but when you add in getting ready for a baby, "quick" trips to Florida, birthdays, holiday parties, ornament creation, tree trimming, present purchasing, work projects and all the holiday baking that needs to be done it starts to feel more like a race against the clock than a time to be merry and gay. 

All the things we think we need to make a season bright are really not so.  The “run, run, run, buy, buy, buy” model of the holidays is beginning to drive me mad.  What I really want to do is spend time in my kitchen with a cookie or two and some close friends and family, nothing more nothing less.  I work myself into a state every year trying to create the best and most wonderful holiday, and though this comes from a place of love mingled with lost childhood I find it’s the unexpected moments I end up relishing:  catching the Grinch or Charlie Brown on TV, quietly curling up by the tree rereading A Christmas Carol for the billionth time, the lit up architecture of a city street lined in white lights and above all the perfect golden color of baked delights coming out of the oven.  (Or the really deep dark holiday pleasures like binge eating ice cream and downing eggnog while watching Dolly Parton and Lee Majors in A Smokey Mountain Christmas or A Diva’s Christmas Carol starring Vanessa Williams.  Trashy?  Yes.  Genius?  Quite possibly.

As soon as Thanksgiving weekend was over the calendar began to take on an ominous glow of red and green tasks, the first being to put up the tree.  Since we aren’t sure when the baby is coming (hopefully in January, but technically we are at 38 weeks December 29th, a mere 2 weeks away) my thoughts were to get the tree up early for maximum enjoyment and then take it down as soon as Christmas has gone so there isn’t a dead tree left standing in the living room as a giant cat play-toy while we are in Pennsylvania for up to two weeks.

I love going to the nursery and picking out the tree.  It’s not far from our house and they always have a great selection of Fraser firs (which are my favorite).  The fragrance that’s ushered into the house with the still dripping sap is the most wonderful smell I know of (with the exception of fresh baked cookies).  The annual ritual of heading up into the attic to find the ornaments, searching for the stockings and deciding what sort of tree scheme to go with makes me happy.  This year I wanted to stick to something traditional and leaned largely toward handmade ornaments.

For the past several years I’ve been making ornaments out of paper clay to adorn the tree along with the many snowflakes and crafted pieces my grandmother made when I was growing up.  I think the snowflakes are my favorite, but the clay ornaments are my contribution to continuing the craft/ornament-making tradition.  I order my springerle mold in the summer so I can be certain of getting the one I want…this year is a sweet, little winter pinecone…and long about the end of November head to the craft store to purchase a couple pounds of clay.   I cast the ornaments on Thanksgiving weekend so that they will have at least a week to air dry before I can paint them and add colorful ribbon from which to hang on the tree.

Once the tree is up then it’s time to decorate outside.  The neighbors and I were out on a somewhat warm and sunny afternoon stringing up garland, bows and lights.  I love that the people on my street are as into holiday décor as I.  It makes coming home at night a joy to look down the lane and see so many houses all lit up and welcoming.  So what if the electric bill practically doubles, right?  It’s all in service to peace on earth and good will to men, and the chance to blow your neighbors out of the water with a bigger, badder and brighter display than they every dreamed of creating…but I digress.

Now that the house is ready and all the lights are on its time to start shopping for the perfect gift.  Email after email of sales come flooding into my inbox vying for my attention.  Each sale promises more discounts and more reductions and more stuff that we can’t possibly ever live without, and we fall for it.  We are aimless people pleasers in the end, and find extreme guilt residing in our hearts if we don’t spend a certain dollar amount in the name of love.  But I’m also here to help with that problem.  The answer is baking.

Cookies are the gift I’m becoming most known for along with the ornaments.  It’s a gift made from my own hands and something no retailer is selling (right now anyway).  I generally have a plan for the cookie, cake and steamed pudding schedules worked out before December ever arrives (maybe I’m a little too organized?) but this year, in addition to my normal routine, I was thrown a curveball…a cookie competition at work!

I’ve never worked anywhere that cared enough or had the desire to have a cookie competition...or food competition of any kind for that matter.  Apparently last year they had a chili cook-off, but in keeping with the holiday season decided cookies were the things to do.   It was a decorating contest primarily, one in which you could purchase cookies to decorate beautifully, or make your own as I did.   I was determined as ever to win so I began practicing the week before.

I love a sugar cookie.  Every year I make them and they are always the biggest dessert hit among my friends.  Now I admit I’m more of a fan of rustic looking desserts or something with very clean/sparse decorating, and I don’t often go for the colored royal icings and flooding techniques because to be honest it can be quite time consuming.  If it’s a dessert that’s going to require more than a few hours of my time…especially on a school night, it’s probably not going to happen.  But what I did do was take my plain Jane sugar cookies to the next level.

I was looking for a new and interesting idea for the simple cookies.  I did my usual scouring of magazines and happened to run across the desired look in Country Living magazine.  I don’t normally get this magazine because it doesn’t really contain a lot of content I’m particularly interested in.  No judgment here, it’s just not my style or particularly geared toward me as a demographic.  The reason I picked up a copy was because of the Fabulous Beekman Boys.  If you recall from last summer Brian, Kassi and I took a trip to Sharon Springs, NY to their store Beekman 1802 and also drove back by their farm and mansion on our way home.  Well, I’m still a huge fan of those guys, so when I found out their home had a holiday spread in the December 2010 Country Living I just had to get it.

The feature on the house is beautiful, and toward the back of the magazine are several photos and recipes for cookies, one being a Linzer cookie in the shape of a Christmas tree.  That was it!!!  I loved the clean simple lines of the tree with the “cut-out” center revealing the glorious ruby colored jam.  Traditionally the tops of Linzer cookies or cakes are covered with confectioners sugar before being placed on the jam covered base, but traveling with powdered sugar covered cookies seemed like a bad idea.  I decided to modify them in a couple of different ways.

First, I made my batch of basic sugar cookie dough (this links to a very similar recipe).  I divided the dough in half, making two separate rectangles, wrapping them in plastic wrap and putting them in the fridge to chill.  The longer the dough rests the better, but it should stay in the refrigerator for at least 2 hours before rolling it out.  I used the first half of dough on a Saturday to try the cookies out, and I left the other half wrapped in the fridge until I needed it on Wednesday night.  If I was going to wait more than a few days before using the dough I would recommend freezing it and then thawing it out the night before you want to use it.

The first round of cookies I made was rather large in size, bordering on unwieldy.  I had purchased a fairly big Christmas tree cookie cutter to use in tandem with a box of smaller holiday cookie cutters I found at Sur la table.  Using a large cookie cutter, the half batch of dough only made a dozen Linzer sandwich cookies.  They were large and lovely, and definitely rich.  The trick to making cookies like these is freezing the dough on parchment-lined sheets once you have cut out all the cookies (for about 25-30 minutes).  It can take quite a little bit of time to carefully cut, trim and decorate the cookies with sanding sugar and dragees, and all the while the dough is getting warmer and warmer.  If you were to put them directly in the oven they wouldn’t hold their shape and all you would have left would be sad masses of misshapen trees, a real disappointment after spending so much time meticulously creating the perfect forest.

The only filling I saw in the magazine was red currant jam, but I wanted to go a bit further and also make a green filling for my trees.  A couple of years ago I made a batch of shortbread for my friend Lisa’s birthday party.  Lisa is a huge Superman fan and I thought it would be fun to cover the shortbread in some sort of kryptonite glaze.  I achieved this by making lime curd (links to a similar recipe, just replace half the lemon juice and zest with that of limes) and tinting it with food coloring.  Using that as a springboard, I made a batch of curd to spread on the Linzer cookie bases, this time infusing it with not only lime but rosemary as well.

I borrowed my rosemary sugar technique from last month’s cranberry sauce and ground up 2 tablespoons of the fragrant herb in the food processor with the sugar.  Once the curd is cooked, it gets poured through a mesh sieve, so all of the rosemary, lime zest and possible bits of cooked egg don’t make it into the curd.  After it’s strained, add a lot of green, a touch of blue and a touch of black food coloring until you get the forest green color befitting a tree shaped cookie.

You are left with a smooth and spreadable glaze perfect for this sort of decorating.  The rosemary flavor wasn’t terribly strong, and I think I could have added another whole tablespoon to bring out its pungent flavor, but the lime and lemon juice used in the curd really pack a flavorful punch all on their own.  Paired with the buttery sugar cookie it was a heavenly and zesty sweet sandwich anyone would love to get as a present.

With the trial run over, the remaining dough chilling for a couple of days and a fresh made batch of curd in the fridge, I was prepared to make my weeknight cookies for competition.  I decided over the course of the week that the sandwich cookies were just too darn big, so I switched from the large Christmas tree cutter to a medium sized one, one that would still accommodate my small tree cutter and give a more refined look to my tree cookies.   I rolled, I cut, I sanded and placed dragees and ended up with what I think is a very stylish update on the regular old sugar cookie (or Linzer cookie for that matter).  The replacement of confectioner’s sugar with a basic white sanding sugar is the way to go if you are going to be transporting these cookies.  No muss, no fuss and honestly I prefer the flavor of sanding sugar to its powdered cousin.

The big day rolled around and I couldn’t believe how many people decided to participate.  There were 17 entries!!!  You never really think of finding a lot of bakers or pastry decorators in the animation business.  Most of the folks I used to work with were twenty something guys who rarely even cooked for themselves, but many of the people I’m currently working with are a little older, more my age, more established in life with houses, spouses and kids and seem to love food nearly as much as me.  The cookie turnout was amazing and undoubtedly some serious competition.

We were all asked to try each cookie before judging it on decoration and taste.  Getting through seventeen cookies is quite a feat and one I don’t wish to repeat very often.  If I may be so bold, I think everyone was seriously ill after six or seven, but we kept going as if Santa himself was holding a gun to our head, forcing us to down more and more sugary morsels until there were none left to be had. 

In the end did I win?  Sadly I must report I did not.  One of our directors, Aaron Stewart easily bested everyone by creating “story-board” cookies.  For anyone not in the CG business reading this, they were essentially cookies covered in fondant that visually told a story.  There were only a dozen frames (cookies) describing how a chopped down Christmas tree got its revenge, but they were effective.  The cookies were clean and colorful and almost everyone was afraid to eat them…possibly they didn’t want to ruin the story?  Anyway, my friend Sara came in second with what I would call her psychedelic gingerbread cookies, and I tied for third with another director, Michelle, for her cookies portraying staff members from Hornet Inc. where we work.

Of course I wanted to win, but I was so blown away and happy to be working somewhere that would have a cookie competition that it took away some of the sting.  I don’t think I will be making any more cookies for the next couple of weeks, until closer to Christmas as gifts, and that’s just fine because I think my insulin levels need to normalize once more before I can even look at another cookie.

Now we are staring at Christmas down the barrel of a gun.  Hanukkah has come and gone, and though I wanted to create something fried in oil to honor this holiday I just didn’t have time to squeeze it in.  Instead I wanted to make something for Brian for his birthday…but no ordinary cake.  Brian tends to like soft foods, you know like mashed potatoes and gravy, custards, soups, puddings etc…and I thought to change things up a bit this year I would try my hand at a bread pudding.  

I always like to order it when I’m out, but I can’t recall ever making it on my own.  I would love to tell you I baked my own bread to use in this recipe, but the truth is I didn’t.  The theme of baking within time constraints continues to pop up and was the same case in this situation.  However, I don’t know that bread is what makes a bread pudding so good as much as all the cream that goes into it.  I bought a perfectly lovely loaf of French bread, cut it into cubes and dried it out in a 250 degree oven for 10 minutes so it was nice and dry and ready to soak up all the high calorie liquid which makes up this pudding.

It’s really quite simple because it’s mainly eggs and cream with some flavoring brought in with vanilla, nutmeg, orange, lemon, raisins and a little sugar to boot…it’s Martha’s Bread Pudding 101 recipe.  You put it all together in a shallow baking dish and an hour later you have something completely decadent and delicious that I can’t imagine anyone turning up their noses at a birthday party or any other celebration.  It’s one of those desserts I found so shockingly good I couldn’t believe I’d never made one before.  Brian seemed happy and therefore I was happy too.

The winter holidays can be quite daunting if you let them.  Making it through is all about time management and squeezing in some festive downtime whenever possible.  I had my camera with me on the day of the cookie competition and decided to get a few shots of the holiday city at night while on my way home from work.  There are few things better (to me) than walking through a dolled up Christmas-y New York City on a brisk winter evening, taking in all the lights and tourists and getting lost in the magic with everyone else.   People revert to their childhood selves once again and seem to want nothing more than to have a good time with their fellow man, be that drinking beers in Santa outfits or ice-skating in the middle of a park.

Sometimes I get cranky with the city, cranky with tasks, and cranky with the rigorous Christmas schedule I put myself through, and I don’t think Santa would approve.  With that kind of attitude I might end up on the naughty children list.  It’s important to stop, take a step back and remember why I’m doing it…so people will feel guilty and buy me presents.  No, wait, that’s not it.  Presents be darned, I want the fantasy!

I want all singing, all dancing, elf driven spectaculars with frosted windowpanes and a world falling in love.  I want Charles Dickens and Washington Irving to have a 19th century love child, and I will be that love child.  I want burning Yule logs on the hearth and English countrysides covered in snow.  I want German villages full of glowing trees, cobblestone walkways, Dresden vintage ornaments and small children in search of the gherkin hiding on the tree, excitedly hoping to find it and receive a gift.  I want lit up menorahs and fried latkes and chrusciki.  I want spirits of the past, present and future haunting my Victorian boudoir and showing me all the things I can do to make the world a better place.  And above all else I want a memory laden holiday with friends and family, a time where everyone feels joy at being together and happily snacks on cookies and panettone and steamed puddings and maybe a nice glass of wine or two and a nibble of cheese.  I want an old fashioned Christmas set in 2010 with Santa representing reason and joy as much as magical sleigh rides and the man who corrals red nosed reindeer.  I want the fantasy and I will do everything I can to help it along.  It’s just who I am.