What a weird year

And, I realize it’s incredibly privileged to be calling this pandemic year “weird”. Everyone in my family is working remotely, still getting paid, relatively safe. But in terms of cookie season in the pandemic year, it’s weird. I am vacillating between borderline depression, feeling like nothing’s coming out right, and moments of feeling happy and giddy while baking … Today I decided the feeling good part is two things – simply being more active, spending evening hours moving around in the kitchen, baking, instead of watching TV on the couch; and, increased sugar consumption which is boosting my metabolism!

Seems like all my old good tools & recipes are failing – the oven doesn’t to want to hold a temp; I had the worst melted butter kitchen disaster while melting the butter for the iced ginger cookies, and they came out kinda flat; in trying to get the oven hot enough, cranking it up, I kinda burned some baby ruggelach – well, maybe not burned, shall we say “deeply caramelized”?

But it’s Wednesday, and progress is being made. I have until Sunday night to keep baking, and should start packing boxes on Monday. How well my USPS flat rate express mail is going to work remains to be seen. Fingers crossed. Last Saturday I emailed a bunch of my box recipients and got a few passes for this year, they gained too much weight in pandemic, they have nobody to share cookies with … all of which I expected.

The butter disaster is a distant memory, from last Thursday. I was trying to cook between meetings … I got a bag of brown sugar out of the closet saw it was split, but not before some sugar spilled on the floor. I bent over to clean up the sugar, turning my back on the stove where butter was melting to make the ginger cookies, and it chose that moment to erupt out of the pot – must’ve been watery butter – and there was like half a cup of molten butter all over the stove & the counter & splattered on appliances & salt & pepper shakers. And it congealed as I tried to clean it up. Still, I got it pretty good, thinking I’d be logging into my meeting with like 2 minutes to spare, ran up stairs, woke up my computer, and opened up the agenda to see we were meeting a half hour later than the usual time that day.

I made the ginger cookies Thursday night after everything else, and they didn’t look so bad the next morning, with their icing set.

Friday I took the day off to bake (and only did work work for about 2 hours, maybe a bit more), and made all the slice & bakes. That’s when it seemed like the oven was getting cranky – not hot enough and/or not holding its set temperature. Cookies not browning or cooking too fast. I went for a walk and picked up tags and twine and a stamp for the Cookie Fundraiser boxes (I am going to need more tags, I only got 40 – maybe another Friday walk to Hilldale), and stopped at the hardware store and bought an oven thermometer, that I’ve decided I don’t trust either.

I think I have learned to cope. Instead of cranking up the temperature, if the oven says it’s 350° but doesn’t seem hot enough, I turn it off – it’s usually lower than it’s saying – and turn it on again to re-heat. But the oven thermometer was saying even lower which induced me to crank the temp and burn (caramelize) the ruggelach.

Here’s the slice & bakes: World Peace, crystallized ginger, cranberry-pistachio.

And oh yeah, here’re the chocolate crinkle cookies that never crinkled – which I thought was the oven, but might be the recipes. Somewhere in there, Saturday, maybe? I made the vegan ginger snaps and they crinkled OK, although like the ruggelach a few got too dark. No pics of the snaps, but see below in the typical box.

I was kinda excited Sunday that it was ruggelach day, but you can see how that turned out. I was initially disappointed with the cranberry ruggelach I tried out, the filling’s from an old cookbook, Sarah Leah Chase’s Cold Weather Cooking, and Lora Brody rugelach cream cheese pastry. But I tried one today after it had been in the fridge a few days, and it’s better.

I re-made some ruggelach Monday night – as usual I had overbought on cottage cheese, so I figured I had an extra carton, might as well. It’s not cottage cheese I like to eat, it’s Breakstone, not the ultra expensive Nancy’s that seems to be the only brand that tastes good and is not too watery anymore. I thought everything was going great, I was coping with the oven, but I had a lot of the brown sugar and walnuts and cinnamon filling leftover … then when I was putting stuff away I found two additional balls of ruggelach dough in the fridge that I forgot. I stuck it in the freezer with the filling, and I figure later on I will make some hybrid ruggelach just for us – use apricot jam and raisins and roll them a bit bigger, like in the Lora Brody recipe, and also roll up some of my brown sugar-walnut-cinnamon filling in there too. They’ll be delicious.

Also some day in there, maybe Saturday? I made the zimtsterne, the gluten free meringue and almond cookies.

And linzer thumbprints, currently the blog banner, and Rose’s crescents, and pecan snowballs. Again except for the linzer, no individual pics, but they will appear in boxes, presently.

And last night, around my class presentations, the spoon cookies. Got them all baked before class, and jammed together after. Like the ruggelach, they are a super time consuming one, so glad they’re done. I only made 4 pounds of butter’s worth this year instead of the 6 pounds of butter I’ve been doing in not-weird years – which was still about 120 sandwiches – and I think I might stay at 4 next year. Similarly, I made caramel pecan bars this morning, and doing a single batch seemed to avoid the awkward phase I always seem to have after I pour the cream into the caramelized sugar and it seizes and hardens into sugar lumps and I’m trying to get it to melt back to smooth – didn’t happen at all this time. I warmed the cream too.

And, today is the day I start giving cookies away – always the best part of cookie season. I packed some boxes for work colleagues to pick up from my porch today, so tomorrow after our last zoom meeting of this year, we can have a zoom social and we’ll all have cookies. I’ll have class after, so no mulled wine for me with my cookies, but that day will surely come sometime soon during the holidays. This is pretty much what the Cookie Fundraiser boxes will be like, too.