Cookies and candy

(This is another real-time message).

I've been doing some baking and candy-making, despite the fact that my father really no longer eats sweets (meaning there are fewer people to eat them up).

However, there's one cookie I feel like I always have to make, that it wouldn't be Christmas without it. These are my grandmother's cutout cookies - a simple butter cookie but one that always reminds me of her.

She used to make these when I was a kid. She would mail them to me, packing them in a 2-pound coffee can. Even one year when she had hurt her back and found it hard to stand, she still made them. They were a big part of my early Christmases, and I've now been making them myself for some 20 years.

It's a pretty simple recipe:

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1 egg
1/4 t almond extract
1/2 t vanilla
3 1/2 cups flour (you can add more if you need to, but they are really better with the smaller amount - the recipe says "3 1/2 to 4")
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
6 Tablespoons buttermilk.

You cream the butter and sugar, and then beat in the egg and flavorings. Then sift together the dry ingredients, and add them alternately with the buttermilk (as you would for a cake). The dough is soft and will need to chill for at least an hour.

Then, on a well-floured board, roll the dough out.

And here is a point of preference for me, and also the way my grandmother did it: I always roll the dough very, very thin. 1/8 inch at the thickest, 1/16 inch is better.

I don't frost these cookies. As I've said before, I'm not that big a fan of frosting.. If you want to frost them, you will need to roll them thicker.

And then you cut them out. Part of the fun for me is trying to be as sparing as possible - to fit the cutters together so there's minimal waste of dough. (I do save, and re-roll, the scraps once, but after that they begin to get tough). My mother owns dozens of cutters. Some are probably now considered "vintage," those old clear-red plastic ones, for example - I've seen them in antique shops. But I still like to use them. (I think this is the only time they get used in a year). I use all the "traditional" ones - the reindeer and Christmas tree and angel and star and bell, but I also like to use a heart cutter (which I think came from a "card suits" set - we also have a diamond and a club, and I think there's a spade somewhere). And a camel, from an animal set we had. (And the seal, too - so if people ask, I can look deadpan and them and say, "It's a Christmas Seal.") And a pig, because it fits well in those odd spaces. And a pineapple, because it's fun to decorate part of it with yellow sugar and the leaves with green sugar. And there are others. I guess we did cut-out cookies a lot when I was a kid (I certainly remember bugging to be allowed to do them a lot), so we have a lot of the cutters.

I bake them at 375. For the very thin cookies, it takes 6 to 8 minutes. You need not grease the pan, but I like to use parchment paper because they seem to come off more easily.

The way I decorate them is the way my grandmother did: with colored sugars. Or I put sprinkles on some of the cookies (chocolate ones are good for reindeer; it looks like "fur"). But some of the cookies I always do with just red and green sugars, because that's how my grandmother did it. And I can look at those cookies and remember what it was like to be a little child again. And I think that's part of what Christmas is about.

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I also made taffy for the second time in my life. (And had it turn out, for the first time). The first time I made it, I used a recipe from the Little House Cookbook. And it was summer. And I was an impatient child. And I think I pushed my mother to take the candy off the heat too soon. And maybe we didn't pull it enough. I remember it as being inedibly sticky but she said "It still tasted good."

This time I cooked it longer, using a recipe from the Farm Journal candy book. (2 cups sugar, 1/2 cup light corn syrup, 2/3 cup of water, cook until the sugar is dissolved, and then cook over low-medium heat, without stirring, until it reaches hard ball stage - I cooked it to 265 degrees F as it was a little humid last night, you have to cook candy harder when it's humid). Then I added 1/4 t of spearmint oil. (The OIL flavoring, which is hard to find now, not extract). Then my mom and I pulled heck out of it - it was amazing to watch it going from a clear yellow color, to an opaque creamy white. When it got too stiff to pull further, we cut it in pieces.

And it set up beautifully. It's kind of hard, so you have to suck on a piece before you can chew it, but once it softens up, it's not that sticky. (If you remember the old Turkish Taffy, it's kind of like that in consistency.)

I enjoy candy-making; there's enough of chemistry and physics to it to make it really fascinating, despite the hour or two of waiting for a sugar syrup to come to temperature.