A couple of people have suggested I start a blog about my adventures in the kitchen... so here it goes...
The first one is a reminiscing about the sweets of the holiday seasons--inspired by cooking pecan sandies (my paternal grandmother's family recipe) and a doctored version of "million dollar fudge" (something my maternal grandmother used to make--I make it with dark chocolate, a touch of salt, and a splash each of espresso and liquer).
Growing up we always had tons of sweets during the holiday season--partially because of the frugal backgrounds of my grandparents and partially because they all liked making presents instead of buying impersonal trinkets.
As a kid, I waited for the holiday season every year to get iced sugar cookies from a friend of my grandmother. She painstakingly rolled the dough, cut holiday shapes, and then handpainted them--more than just a simple single-color icing, she painted ornaments and strands on the trees, a full red & white suit on Santa, and colored ribbons on the bells.
It's funny how a few things came and went over the years--one of my grandmothers used to bake mince-meat pies and the other did peanut brittle... both items eventually were dropped from the holiday baking. For many years, my mother made turtles, truffles, and filled chocolate balls--again, they all disappeared from the holiday season. I'll have to revive some of these I think--they were labor intensive, but fun and great to do as an assembly line of friends.
The things that remained were the cookies and fudge I made this evening and one additional cookie. The additional cookie has several spellings from my grandmother's grandmother's (etc.) handwritten recipes--vanillekanzes is the one that we've all settled on (if anyone knows the real name, let me know!).
Vanillekanzes are the essence of the holidays. The single batch of dough makes at least a gross of cookies if not 2 gross. It's a stiff butter, flour, egg, sugar dough that you roll paper thin, coat with an egg wash, press a few toasted almond slices into and sprinkle with sugar. They cook up light and crispy and are more addictive than Lays potato chips. Over the years, the extremely stiff batter claimed the lives of many hand mixers.
Ok... enough rambling.... what sweets remind you of the holiday season?
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