The cookie plate

This is a photo grabbed yesterday morning before I took the cookies over to work. The plateful was mostly-demolished by yesterday afternoon.



We have 10 faculty in the department, but several of those are (still fairly) young guys with fast metabolisms, so stuff like cookies gets eaten fairly fast. Luckily I saved a few of each out in a tin at home for myself, so I could eat them at my leisure. (As one of my colleagues, who came from a large family, said: "He who eats last eats least.")

(The cookies on the right are the chocolate-chip refrigerator cookies, and the ones in the middle are the good old almond bars, which are one of my favorites. This year's batch was especially good; the last time I ran out of almond extract I wound up buying the Watkins' product as a replacement - I can actually get that at the local Mart of Wal - and I think it's superior to the other grocery-store almond extracts I've had in the past).

I may comb through my books for more refrigerator cookie recipes. I always forget how EASY they are - no dropping what feels like ten thousand tablespoons-full worth of dough out on the cookie sheets; you can just slice off as many cookies as you want to bake and do them. (A friend of our family when I was growing up would keep rolls of several kinds of the dough in her freezer, and pull out and slice off part of one when she wanted fresh cookies). Which means refrigerator cookies would solve another problem I have with baking cookies: most batches make too many for just me, and I wind up with far more cookies than I want to eat, and they go stale. But with refrigerator cookies, I could keep the dough frozen and bake up a dozen at a time.

I suppose these types of cookies have largely been supplanted by the tubes of dough from the store, but I think the homemade ones taste better (But I don't think they're cheaper to make any more, at least not if you use real butter and real nuts and stuff like that in them). I think my Farm Journal cookie book has a chapter of recipes for refrigerator cookies (Or "icebox" cookies, as we often called them - my grandmother called them icebox cookies because when she was first married, her "refrigerator" literally WAS an icebox.) Typically these cookies have more shortening than drop-type cookies so they will stay set up in a roll.

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And here is a little regression to childhood. One of the toy books I have - it might have been the wonderful Jean Ray Laury one - talks about how children cherish their soft toys and often ask for scarves or vests for them because the toy 'feels cold.' Yes, that's a familiar memory. (Though often, as a child, I made the scarves and vests myself - after my mom taught me to sew, knit, and crochet. You can actually make a vest pretty quickly out of felt as felt does not need to be hemmed).

In fact, my very first knitting project ever was a scarf for my Kermit the Frog doll.

This weekend, in between pulling cookie pans out of the oven, I got to thinking it would be fun to knit some toy scarves up out of scraps of sockyarn I had on hand. And so, I did. Just cast on about a dozen stitches and knit until they were "long enough," then bound off (and how much easier binding off comes for me NOW, than it did during my early days of toy-scarf making: binding off was one of the hardest things for me to successfully learn). And then I knotted on a fringe on each end using a crochet hook to "latch hook" the yarn in.

Just a silly little thing but fun. And sometimes it's good to remember the happy times of childhood.

Here's Fluttershy. I used the scraps of the Deborah Norville "Serenity" sockyarn (it has bamboo in it).



I didn't think my Fluttershy amigurumi could get any more "D'awwww!" than she already was, but that scarf ups the cute factor even more.

I couldn't leave little Derpy out, so I knit her a scarf, too. This is from a - I think it's an Online yarn, maybe? It's one that I described as making my "roller derby girl" socks out of because of the pattern of striping. I made this scarf longer and it's a bit more rustic looking:



Though actually, I'm not sure how good a scarf would be as an accessory for a flying horse. I'm thinking of Isadora Duncan here.

(Also, I'm now thinking of Derpy as a Roller Derby Girl and laughing...and you know, it *almost* fits. (Sometimes she is portrayed in the "disaster girl" sort of meme)).