I know its not Christmas time, but I made cookies today. Cookies always make me think of Christmas.. so.. here goes-

Once my older sister found out Santa wasn’t real, I knew Santa wasn’t real. We’re only three years apart, and her goal in life between my birth and the age of 10 was to injury, maim or otherwise scar me for life. It just makes sense that she would tell me the Santa secret. I tried to not believe her, but I was a skeptical kid anyways. My family sort of lost interest in maintaining the Santa secret after my sister found out anyways, and things went sort of downhill. Santa went on a diet, and we left him sandwiches. Sure, we made cookies, but they weren’t for him, they were for these enormous cookie baskets that we gave to family members.

Christmas was cookie baking time, and inevitably my sister and I would get the urge to make thousands of cookies with no inherent purpose other than to make every member of my family gain weight.

Christmas with me and my sister wasn’t held only to the confines of the winter months. Oh no-neverbashfulwithbutter.comhttp://www.neverbashfulwithbutter.com It began almost immediately after it ended. Sure, we took a few weeks off to recover from present overload, then, just like any addicts, we began to feel withdrawls. Of course, this lead us back into the vicious circle to continue our Christmas Celebration through as many months of the year as possible.

It was much more serious for my sister. She would gather up all of the Christmas wrapping and with delicate tiny tipped scissors, would snip each and every figure, character, drawing, doll, Santa Claus, penguin, snowman, reindeer or any other holiday icon embossed on Christmas wrap in our house. Mostly it was snowmen. My mom collected snowmen. Santa Claus wasn’t really a prevalent holiday icon for us. Christmas meant snow, and snow meant snowmen, and snowmen made my mom happy.

A happy mom was hard to come by at Christmas time. Actually.. From Thanksgiving until St. Patrick’s Day, our family was much more somber than usual. When I was really little it was just something I noticed, and when I asked what was wrong, they’d put on happy faces and pretend everything was OK. It wasn’t until I was much older, right around the time I learned Santa Claus wasn’t real, that I learned that my mom’s dad, my grandfather, had died when she was in her early teens right around Christmas time. I don’t remember the exact date, and thats not exactly something you ask your mom about without expecting a good cry, so.. I always just expected things to be toned down around Christmas.

Things didn’t get any better after Christmas though, because as soon as my mom had begun to snap out of her holiday depression, my sister and I were in Christmas withdrawl, and after that ended, my dad had begun mourning his mother. I don’t know when she died, I do know that she was born on Valentine’s day. The end of November through the beginning of March were the hardest times of the year for my family. My mom was much closer to her dad than her mom, and my dad was much closer to his mother than his father.

So.. as enterprising young children, my sister and I devised a foolproof plan to cheer them both up. We would do all of the cookie baking ourselves!

…Don’t ask me what we were thinking. I was only in the second grade, and my sister was in the fifth grade. I believe that would put us at Seven and ten years old, respectively. We’d only baked cookies with our mom, and really, the only “baking” we did was the shaping of the cookies, and the decorating of the cookies. Sometimes we would stir the batter, or add the chocolate chips.. but never the entire recipe.

We started early, before my mom was awake, and after my dad had left for work. We dug every ingredient out of the cupboards and put them on the counter. We got out the recipe books, including my “kids cookbook” with the recipe for “Darrell’s forget about the cookies just give me that batter” cookies. I don’t remember many other recipes, but.. I remember that one. There were a few other cookbooks we got out.. the Pillsbury cookbook, the Betty Crocker cookbook (the same one I have now, actually) and others that I think just said “cookies” on the front. Our mission was simple. Make at least three different types of cookies. Bake them. Decorate them. Wake mom and present her with cookie wonderfulness.

Suffice to say, we failed. There’s just something about small children cooking up a plan to use dangerous kitchen appliances and utensils that moms can smell. Mischief is a putrid odor to my mom. This was no exception.

She flew down the stairs only a few minutes after my sister turned on the oven. Now that I’m older I’m sure she smelled the oven and thought “FIRE” and woke up. But then, we thought she was a woman possessed. We were really afraid we had ruined Christmas.

I don’t remember the words that were coming out of her mouth. I just remember what it looked like. My mother, angry, wearing a night gown and a pair of slippers, her hair all over the place, no makeup, FLAILING her arms and screaming. Perhaps I blocked the sound out because it was just too much stimuli. Yeah.. we hadn’t even been able to make one single cookie, and yet we had made the kitchen a huge mess. “You could have burnt the house down, or chopped off a finger!” I remember her saying once she had calmed down a bit.

So.. that scared me off baking for a while. I was solely a decorator from that moment until a few years later when my mom decided I could be trusted alone with the oven. It was October, actually, and I wanted to make something special for my mom. I had to make it up to her. The memory of the reason I hadn’t been allowed to use the kitchen appliances was still fresh in my mind.

I dug through all of the cook books. My mom loved chocolate chip cookies and I had to find a perfect recipe for them. I ended up finding a really cool looking recipe for meltaway cookies, which were actually just chocolate chip cookies made with powdered sugar instead of brown sugar. I decided I would make those, so I gathered up all of the ingredients and got to work.

After all was said and done, I had a plate full of… pale looking chocolate chip cookies. I thought she would love them, and so I sat them on the kitchen table, went and got her and presented them to her.

I guess it was a less momentous occasion for her than I. She seemed less than thrilled, but feigned excitement for my sake. She went to the fridge for what I thought would be a glass of milk…

She returned with a jar of strawberry jam and a tub of cream cheese.

I watched, unknowing what she would do next.

she took two cookies and flipped them upside down. Then she spread strawberry jam on the bottoms of the cookies, and followed that with a big dollop of softened cream cheese.

What.. the… heck? What is she doing with my cookies? SHE’S RUINING THEM! She hates them! I did a horrible job!- all of these things ran through my head.. until she handed me one of the cookies… she smiled and I took a bite.

My mom was a genius. (And still is)

So.. today, when I woke up feeling kind of down I decided to make something that reminded me of happier times. Cooking something simple in my family’s kitchen and seeing my mom smile while enjoying a cookie.

The cookies before alterations

Strawberry jam-

Strawberry jam and cream cheese Cookie sandwiches!

Now my mom can’t have chocolate chip cookie sandwiches. She has a few health problems that severely restrict her diet. We did find an amicable resolution to the issue-

Salted rice cakes with strawberry preserves and Tofutti cream “cheese”. Don’t ask me why, but these taste wonderful. If you use the right serving amounts, its also good for you!

But for those of us who can eat cookies, and dairy products, these really are good, and putting the second cookie on top makes them much less messy. One tip would be to refrigerate them after you put the jam and cheese in the center. That way when you bite into them the filling doesn’t go dripping everywhere like it did on me! haha.. I couldn’t resist taking a bite though!

So there you go. You can do this with just about any cookie. I always use Strawberry jam, but you could use any sort of fruit. And yes, this is especially delicious with grape jam and peanut butter cookies. mmm..

-A.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 28th, 2008 at 8:14 pm and is filed under March 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.