HOLIDAY COOKIES
One of the fun parts of the Christmas holidays are Christmas cookies. My mother had an enormous amount of cookie recipes and each year we would decide which ones she would make. One of my favorite cookies were her cut-outs. Her recipe came from an old cookbook called "Aunt Jenny's Favorite Recipes" which I noticed is still available from Amazon. The recipe for my mother's cut out cookies were called "Ice Box Cookies". Why that name I don't know because the dough definitely did NOT go in the ice box before baking.
By the age of 10 I was actively helping my mother with the cookie recipe. It was a lot of work and a lot of mess but the end result were delicious cookies. We frosted them appropriately to their design with the stars frosted yellow, the trees green, the bells and Santa were pink. I can still hear my father saying "can you give me a few of those pink cookies"? They were also a favorite cookie of my Aunt Virginia Schulte and when she and my uncle moved to Arizona in retirement I would send her a box of them every Christmas. She would always tell me that it didn't matter if they broke because she would lick the crumbs right out of the Ziploc bags. She also refused to let my uncle have any because she considered them her treat. (Of course, I did make my uncle's favorite date nut cookies as well which traveled in a much safer manner). My aunt was not a baker and to have these cookies were a special gift for her.
When I was 12 years old my aunt and uncle's son, Mel, Jr., wanted Christmas cookies and since his mother didn't bake I offered to go over to their house and make him our special cut outs. I can still see him, a 17 year old young man sitting at their kitchen table watching me with fascination while I mixed the dough, rolled out the cookies, baked them, let them cool for a while and frosted them. Needless to say I was there the whole day but it was a memory that I still have. I need to ask him sometime if he remembers those cookies. I bet he does!
I have German family living in Berlin. We communicate via "What's App" because I don't speak German very well and my cousin, Uschi, doesn't speak English very well. With "What's App" we can type our message in our own language, have it translate and send it to each other. It is a great tool and free to boot.
The other night I woke up at 4 am because my little dog was interested in some ornaments on the Christmas tree! As I often do when I wake up in the middle of the night I looked at my phone and saw that I had a message from Uschi from Berlin (where it was 10 am). Of course I had to look at the message where she was telling me that she had made Christmas cookies with three of her grandchildren and she had the photos to prove it.
Evidently she was able to tell in Berlin that I was looking at the message at that time and another message came to me from her saying "don't you sleep" which made me laugh and I sent back a message to her stating "I wish I was in Berlin to sample those cookies". It was a fun few minutes of typing messages, translating and sending back and forth.
From her pictures I can see that cookie making and cut out cookie making is the same whether in Michigan or in Berlin, Germany:
and the end result is.....delicious:
Even at 4 am in Michigan I was tempted to make a cup of tea and pretend I was sampling those beauties from Berlin.Copyright 2021, Cheryl J. Schulte
1 comment:
Frohe Weihnachten!
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