Yes...you read that right.
I snatched up a copy of Martha Stewart's Holiday Cookie mag. Now I'm not a 'foodie' by any means, unless you mean EATING food. I love that part of it. The one thing I do love, is baking.
And when the holidays roll around, I dedicate a day to it.
Martha spoke to me, as I waited in line at the Wegman's. I took her home, found a spot on the couch, hugged my xmas mug of mocha and wrapped up the entire magazine with two words: cookie porn.
I will admit, being a graphic artist, it was almost more exciting to see the containers and the way she packaged these gifts of goodness. Brown paper and silver ribbon tubes with small, medallion cookies. Recycled card boxes with ink and stamp names announcing the tasty treasure inside. Wax paper, cut to fold like giant sunflowers, over oddities like "cracked pepper scones".
I needed a candy cigarette after reading it!
While I have my stable of annual cookies that I must bake, for sentimental reasons, if nothing else, I like to add a new one here and there. This mag was going to make it hard to pick just one, so I picked 3.
After completing them, on my ditch day of cookie production, I turned to a three ring binder of sugary love my mom gave my sisters and I a few years back. She index tabbed and clip-arted her way to creating a keepsake I hold near and dear. In its pages are my grandmother's pumpkin pie recipe, my mom's peanut brittle and even one from my mom's childhood that HER grandmother would make: floating island pudding.
As I hunted through to select the old favorites, I came across one that caught my breath and stopped me short.
My dad's Russian Teacakes.
A family favorite. If not for the crumbly, sugary cookie itself, but for the production that my father would put on while making them. Once baked, you have to roll the cookies in powder sugar. Always in a rush, he would "HEE!" and "HOO!" and "HOTSA! the fresh out of the oven dough balls, off the hot cookie sheet and into the bowl of fluffy, powdered sugar. His elbows flying up in an "exit stage left" motion. His fingers, covered in sugar, wiggling to cool off.
It would throw my sisters and I into girlish fits of giggles!
I closed the book, thinking I have enough. I'm going to try and knock out 6 cookies in 8 hours and I still have to go to the grocery store in 2 feet of snow. "Next year." I rationalized, choking down the lump in the throat and leaning my head back, hoping the tears would drain back into the ducts that let them loose, for the millionth time, since last April.
I got the cookies done. They were displayed with pride at our semi-annual Xmas party. But I still felt like I had forgotten something.
A few days later, my phone jumped alive with its chirpy text sound. There on my phone was a picture of a pile of Russian Teacakes!
My baby sister, on top of rising to the occasion of running my parents 'kingdom' in my father's absence, and keeping my mother sane, had found the 'gumption' I was missing to made them.
"I thought I would make them so when mom got back, they would all be done," the type accompanying the picture stated.
"Save some for when I get there!" I responded
Maybe this holiday, so changed forever, might go better with some teacakes and a glass of milk to wash it down.
