Holiday Hangover

Perhaps it wasn't a great idea to start this blog right before the holidays. My poor kitchen has been put through its paces over the past two months. The cabinets are starting to pull away from the walls and their doors are almost worn off the hinges, but we both just managed to survive another holiday season.

I've taken on several ambitious culinary projects recently, but none crazier than my annual Christmas cookie tins. It started innocently enough three years ago. It was my first Christmas with Jason, and we had been together long enough that I had started to worry about impressing his family. So I decided to bake up a few dozen cookies because that's what I do - I win people's affection with baked goods. I mixed and baked for an afternoon, packed everything up in some Tupperware containers, and sent them off to Jason's parents, grandmothers, my mother, and a few close friends. The response from Jason's Grandma H was so overwhelmingly positive, I knew I had started a tradition.

The madness began to set in the second year, when I decided to get a little fancy. I ordered these attractive-looking silver tins, complete with pads and appropriately-sized shipping boxes. I am not great at visualizing measurements, and the tins ended up being much, much bigger than I anticipated. I had seven tins to fill, and I knew I was going to have to make a lot of cookies to fill them. I ended up making multiple batches of five different types of cookies - glazed butter, spritz, lace, chocolate swirly, and rum balls. It took a lot of upper body strength (I only had a hand mixer then) and three days of back-breaking work. Jason pulled out some random art supplies and spent an entire day lining and packing the tins. The result was way fancier than I could have imagined:

The cookies went over well, to say the least. I was so exhausted I didn't even want to think about doing it again, but I knew I had created a tradition I couldn't stop. And surely enough, I started to get inquiries about my cookie plans from a few cookie recipients shortly after Halloween. Now that I'm bona fide, I felt some pressure to top last year's tins. I decided to do five varieties again this year because I like the way they look together, but I swapped out the chocolate swirly cookies for molasses spice because they're much tastier. And I decided to roll the lace cookies into cigarettes and dip them in chocolate because I couldn't send out tins completely bereft of chocolate. I knew I had my work cut out for me because the cookie list had grown to a whopping 13. But I figured with my new, super duper, 14 cups of flour power mixer, it wouldn't be as difficult as last year.

I was so, so wrong. Aretha performed like a champ. She churned through quadruple batches of dough without straining. The problem is that once I made all of this dough, I had to do something with it. I may have the world's best standing mixer, but alas, I still only have two hands, one poorly calibrated oven, and two baking sheets. To give you a better idea of my insanity, here are some numbers:

105 rum balls
114 spritz cookies
113 molasses cookies
185 glazed, decorated butter cookies
175 rolled, chocolate-dipped lace cookies

That's 692 (53 dozen) cookies for those of you still counting. Or 10 lbs each of butter, sugar, and flour.

Jason, to his great credit, not only maintained his good humor and his affection for me through all of the madness, he also spent an entire day making the packaging look extra professional. He even photographed each of my cookies to make a little cookie guide with my logo on it.

At some point Jason casually said, "Maybe we don't do the cookies every year." And it's true that nothing was easy about the cookie tins this year, from the grocery shopping (No delivery! No cabs!) to the making and baking to carrying the tins a very icy 1/2 a mile to the post office. But I am awfully proud of the result and have been basking in praise ever since they were delivered. I'm not quite sure if I'm going to be recovered in time to do it all over again in 11 months, so for now I'm just trying to reclaim my appetite for cookies.