Baking For Others

This post has been ripening in my WordPress drafts for days, even though I almost never procrastinate writing for this site. Yet if ever there were a post that dismissed my desire to apologize for its lateness, it’s this one. These Christmas cookies are invented for procrastinators, for bakers with high expectations but paltry amounts of time with which to follow through on lofty goals. These are cookies for the twenty-something who made big promises to herself on the cookie-baking front–”I’m going to send cookies to all my friends and family and workmates this year!”–and then got busy with holiday parties and happy hours and work and sleep and shopping. These are pretty little soft iced gingersnaps with a corner-cutting, quarter-life soul.

This time of year, some bakers make an assortment of cookies. Others double down on the decorations, festooning sugar cookie Santas, trees, snowflakes, and stars with bright icings and sparkly sprinkles.

Either approach requires a reasonable investment in ingredients, shopping, and preparation.

On the other hand, with these gingersnaps, I simplified holiday baking to its essence, starting with spiced dough, which asks for no special ingredients or equipment–not even a handheld mixer. Instead of rolling out the dough to cut into gingerbread men and women, I just formed little balls. For the royal icing, I skipped food coloring and topped the gingersnaps with bright and festive white, which I amplified with one single decoration, really pretty little white pearls. These snowflake sprinkles would be lovely, too. But if you’re thinking about economy (of money and cabinet space) stick to one kind of sprinkle.

There was a road I drove once the summer I was 20 and a few times again the summer I was 21. The two lanes wove northwest of I-89 through Vermont, over the mountains. The route was beautiful and windy, then the way leveled out, pointing the car through farmland. One of the best best kinds of American landscapes, and the kind of drive I miss now that I’m a dedicated mass transit-ite.

The road reminds me of summer, and of being 20 and 21. Ah. But I bring up the road today because it also reminds me of Snickerdoodles and Morning Glory Muffins.

Somewhere along the road, a mountain town materialized. The kind with a country store, a restaurant with a porch, and a bookstore-slash-bakery. The bookstore-bakery served freshly baked cookies, muffins, and cake, and strong coffee. On a few of the drives, I bought huge, chewy snickerdoodles and dense, homey morning glory muffins. I remember them as the best snickerdoodles and best morning glory muffins I’ve ever had. I could probably find the town and the shop using my high-level Googling skills, and then go back there on a pilgrimage, but I never have.

Since then though, I’ve gotten a morning glory muffin wherever I’ve seen one. The morning glory muffin is the compost cookie of the breakfast basket. Anything goes–into the batter.

Every year, those of us who like food spend time brainstorming, imagining, and pinning great updates to our Thanksgiving tables.

And every year, we make the exact same thing. This might seem not very creative, for people who really like food. But I love the Thanksgiving menu we go back to year after year. It’s really delicious. It’s satisfying.

Food52′s Kristen Miglore has perfected her Genius Recipes column. Her writing and the recipes she picks out have gotten lots of kudos, but I’d like to add some more – just the way Kristen adds her original kudos to great recipes that may have already made their way around the internet.

When I first starting posting recipes and stories online, I was sure that food writing prized originality above all else. I’d consider posting a recipe for pasta in tomato sauce, but then I’d decide against it. Everyone can figure out how to sauté onion and garlic and add a can of tomatoes. Readers didn’t need to know how I did just that every Sunday night. Right?

And I felt a pressure not to riff off of what other bloggers and writers were baking and braising. It felt like copying. Sometimes, instead of sharing classic recipes, I’d share bizarre ones. For the hell of it, to be different. I had some big wins, like the time I put carrots in cookies. But there are times when I wish I’d developed more straightforward dishes, even if they weren’t the brandest newest meals of all time.

But then at some point I started appreciating, like really appreciating, the creative community around food. I was inspired by the cooking of people I didn’t even know – whose food I’d never even tasted in person. I’d put spin on inspiring recipes I’d found elsewhere, and then watch as readers added their own spins to mine.

Like: I learned about Lemon Posset on Food52 (now that should be a genius recipe!) and poured it into a tart shell I first learned about in Alice Medrich’s cookbooks. That combination became Lemon Posset Tart. The sum belonged to me, even if the parts didn’t.

That’s what cooking is, really. Tweaking and playing around with ingredients in a way that may or may not have been done before. Maybe you’ll hit on a perfect method, maybe you’ll craft a perfect flop. Maybe you’ll simply find another way to do something you’ve done before. I learned when we wrote the book that you can’t copyright a recipe. It’s a formula. What you can put your stamp on is the language and tone and interpretation, giving a voice to a recipe.

You’ve probably seen these flourless peanut butter cookies before. I was re-inspired to make them – and to add sunflower seeds – by this post on xo breakfast. Thanks, world wide web. Gluten Free Girl makes them too: she leaves the cookies as simple as can be, just peanut butter, sugar, egg, and baking powder. Joy the Baker tops each with a big chocolate chunk, which melts in the oven.

On Labor Day weekend, my mom and I drove past a pumpkin patch. Beneath curly vines and leaves as big as plates sat fully formed pumpkins: bright orange, enormous, and begging to be carved.

“Already?” I said.

“No!” my mom said. “They put them there.”

Pumpkin patches? Staged? Alas, yes, at least in my neck of the woods. In September.

And so the pumpkin patch owners caved to pressure to produce pumpkins the second a cool breeze skirted in to subdue autumn humidity, just like Starbucks serves up pumpkin spice lattes way in advance of peak jack-o-lantern season.

No matter that it’s still early October. There’s pumpkin everywhere already. That must mean it’s time for cranberries, too.

Nope. Unlike their orange brethren, cranberries don’t emerge til a few days before Thanksgiving, when we make cranberry sauce or open cans of that jellied stuff. Then they disappear, unseen all year except in the rare scone or biscotti.

And that’s fine with me. My tastes veer towards the sweet and the rich. I can skip the pucker-y with no problem, whether you’re offering me a handful of Sour Patch Kids or planning to spoon beautifully jewel-toned but terribly tangy sauce on top of my turkey, which was completely fine unadorned.

Chocolate subdues those tangy cranberries with its rich creaminess. Beneath a cloud of cocoa, their tang becomes delightful, a fruity afternote to chocolate that’s slightly mysterious: is it cherry? raspberry? Nope, cranberry, in its new chocolate-covered form!

If a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, and you catch more flies with honey, then think of today’s Rosh Hashanah recipe as my attempt to find out what a half cup of honey can do for your year.

Those cliches actually have little to do with sugar. They’re discussing something different, more sinister.

Bribery.

I know this because my sweet tooth has long made me vulnerable to bribery via cookies, ice cream, and cake.

When I was in kindergarten, not long after my little sister Kate’s birth turned me from the baby of the family to the maligned middle child, my mom signed me up for violin lessons. Middle children need special treatment sometimes, she knew. And so once a week we drove to Lincoln Square and I shoved a tiny violin beneath my chin and produced the most horrible squeaking sounds.

Then as now, I was tone deaf, and besides, I couldn’t understand my teacher’s heavy Russian accent.

There’s a lot of food that surrounds a wedding. Cake being one of the most important elements, clearly.

At our wedding, there will be rich, celebratory hors d’oeuvres and rich, festive main courses. There will late-night food–”kid” food, like sliders and quesadillas (it’d be cool to have these on the menu). There will be a Friday night dinner, which we’ve just seen the menu for. There will be cake.

After we eat all that, we’ll probably want to starve ourselves for a week.

And after we do that, we’ll start eating marriage food–which, you know, will be kind of a lot like the food we eat now.