Merry Eating Day!

The holidays are here, which means it's time to bloat the twenty extra pounds I normally carry around with me to a seasonally appropriate thirty. It also means massive quantities of food must be prepared in order to provide at least five pounds per plateload, regardless of whether we're talking about a salad plate, a dinner plate, or a dessert plate.

Yesterday (Christmas Eve-Eve) was primary cooking day for our Christmas day celebrations. In two days, we will feed a total of eight people -- the five who live under our roof, plus my parents and Brother Tom. Naturally, then, we browned three pounds of sausage, rolled eight pounds of beef and pork into meatballs and browned them, then tossed all of that browned meaty goodness into a vat of homemade sauce.

Next came cookies. Simplicity was the motto of the day, so we kept it to one kind of cookie -- the ubiquitous peanut butter Kiss cookie -- that could be easily thrown together and baked without distracting too much from the browning of the meatballs and sausage. Fresh from their morning meat-rolling calisthenics, the kids helped roll out four trays of peanut buttery deliciousness, in addition to shucking several dozen Hershey's Kisses.

After a brief break to clean a pan, or seven, it was time to experiment with something new -- cinnamon pumpkin roll with chocolate mascarpone ganache.

I've baked many things, but never a finished cake that had to be rolled. It seemed like an awful lot of work to go through just to create a delivery method for getting pumpkin cake and chocolate ganache to my mouth, but I was game. Besides, Giada de Laurentis and the Food Network wouldn't steer me wrong.

To Giada's credit, both the cake and the ganache are amazingly delectable, however rolling the pumpkin spice cake might not have been my finest culinary hour. I passed the first test, flipping the pan and dropping the cake onto a towel dusted with powdered sugar. Trouble is, my definition of dusting is slightly more aggressive than Giada's. The cake landed with a satisfying plop and shot powdered sugar up and out like a Christmas-tinged mushroom cloud full of elf fairies and pumpkiny aromas. The next bit, actually rolling the cake without breaking, mangling, tearing, shearing, or otherwise causing traumatic damage to said cake, was less messy but much more sketchy. In the end, I manhandled it into something that roughly resembles a rolled cake.

Today continued with more baking. After all, you can't serve seventeen pounds of meat and sauce without homemade Italian bread, and where one loaf might suffice, two certainly will provide that measure of overkill necessary for a proper holiday feast.

Oh, did I mention the cannoli? Yeah, I bought twenty pre-made cannoli shells (half of them covered in chocolate, because they were there) and prepped two pounds of filling so we can stuff them on Christmas day short before we sit down to eat our six-and-a-half pounds of meat, sauce, pasta and bread each. That way, the cannoli can set up in the fridge without getting the shells all soggy. You have to plan ahead for these things, you know.

The end result is that, by the time we tuck the kids into bed tomorrow night, I should have gained almost the entire extra ten pounds. I'll leave a tiny bit of space for that last cookie before bed.



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

Mango Blech

I believe I've stated my opinions on fruit, but just in case you've missed it there is one overriding rule to which I hold dearly: fruit has no business being in, or anywhere near, cookies. I would broaden that rule to encompass all baked goods, if not for the total deliciousness of cherry tarts, banana bread, and pizza.

Pizza, you ask? Yes, pizza.

Tomatoes are fruit. Pizza sauce is made out of tomatoes. Pizza is a delicious baked bread with pizza sauce spread liberally on top of it. Therefore, pizza is little more than a baked good with fruit on it, very much like cherry tarts, only covered with gooey cheese and enhanced by the addition of pepperoni and mushrooms. End of argument.

The primary violator of the no-fruit-in-cookies rule is the raisin. I enjoy raisins as much as the next man, but they are best when performing solo. A handful of raisins scraped off the cardboard walls of those tiny red boxes makes for a tasty treat. Heck, you can even mix them with nuts and M&Ms to create a handy dandy trail mix. I ate plenty of that this weekend on the long drive to and from Disney World. Nothing wrong at all with trail mix. But trail mix isn't baked, is it?

The raisin's worst offense is when it pretends to be a chocolate chip. You know what I'm talking about. You're at a party, perusing the dessert buffet, and you spot a tray of chocolate chip cookies. You realize the mistake you've made in cookie identification only after you've chomped off a chunk the size of your fist. What should have been chocolaty goodness is instead a slimy smear of baked raisin goo, and you're left with two options: (1) keep chewing and politely finish what you started; (2) drop to your knees, gag like you're dying and spit it out on the carpet.

I would not fault any of you for choosing Option #2.

Some people think you can skirt around the no-fruit-in-cookies rule by making a cookie that tastes like fruit rather than baking actual fruit bits into the cookie. The Girl Scouts are guilty of this trick with their Lemonades. I realize the Lemonade contains no lemony chunks or chewy shards of candied lemon rind, but that's just part of their evil plot.

To make matters worse, this year the Girl Scouts unveiled a new violation of the rule by rolling out the Mango Creme.

Mango...

I have never in my life experienced a desire to taste a mango-flavored cookie, and I have no intention of allowing a harassing gang of badged hooligans to pressure me into to trying this new abomination.

Described as "crunchy vanilla and coconut cookies with a mango-flavored creme filling," the Girl Scouts add insult to injury with their everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach. Coconut, fruit and crunchy? Each of those factors on its own is enough to ruin a cookie. Throw them all together with vanilla and all you end up with is a shameful waste of some perfectly good vanilla. In the next few weeks, when the Girl Scouts start hawking their wares at storefronts and malls across America, I will protest the Lemonade and the Mango Creme.

But I won't protest all their cookies. Homemade chocolate silk ice cream is so much better with crunched up Peanut Butter Patties mixed in. Too bad My Lovely Wife doesn't like bits of cookie in her ice cream.

Some people have way too many rules about food...



© 2013 Mark Feggeler

Cookie Mastery!

There exists for each of us a food item so perfect it cannot be duplicated, nor duplication even attempted, without our rose-colored recollections spoiling our efforts.

Occasionally we try. We ask for directions, instructions, lists of ingredients, and even demonstrations. But no other critic is more harsh than our own memories. Too salty, too sweet, wrong consistency, wrong color -- we dole out judgement before the final product ever comes to be, doomed and aborted before it has the chance to fail on its own merits.

My Lovely Wife and I hold in high esteem certain foods that brought great delight to us during childhood. The very thought of recreating these foods fills us with dread. For me, there are only two favorite foods I have declined attempting during my adult life. One is my grandparents' sauerbraten, the other is my Mother's chocolate-tipped cookie.

Well, as of today, we can scratch one of them off the list.

You must understand I have never, to the best of my knowledge, experienced a holiday season without this cookie. Without trying to overstate the value of the chocolate-tipped cookie, I can tell you it represents Christmas to me. It represents the pinnacle of baked goods from all four corners of the world. It represents, in two bites, the entire goodness of humanity! Good Lord, soak it in a glass of milk for a minute and it might even be able to cure cancer!!!

My brothers understand my high regard for the chocolate-tipped cookie. Each year, beginning in November, our Mother would turn our small kitchen into a neatly-run production line. You had your basics -- chocolate chip, oatmeal & spritz -- and your slightly more exotic -- tea time tassies & rum balls.

One-year the oatmeal cookies morphed into oatmeal raisin and stayed that way. Not that I don't like raisins. I do. It's just I firmly believe they have no business being in a cookie of any kind.

Anyway, Thanksgiving would mark the beginning of the cookie roll-out, building to fever pitch at Christmas and ending around New Year's with that semi-nauseated sense of gratification you get after you've eaten your weight in all-purpose flour.

Of all the cookies Mom would pile on the festive platter, no matter how well she tried to bury them beneath the less-coveted confections, we would swoop in with surgical precision and immediately devour all of the chocolate-tipped cookies. Sometimes I did feel bad for the other cookies. A handful of rum balls and a few fractured tea time tassies would always remain on the platter like fallen soldiers on a battlefield.

And it isn't just my brothers and I who show preference for the chocolate-tipped cookie. As the years have progressed, the grandchildren make it clear each holiday season as we gather round the table for dessert at my parents' house that our chocolate-tipped cookie raid is instinctive. The need to ingest the cookie before all others is programmed into their DNA.

So, this year, knowing how much we all love the holiest of holy cookies, and not wanting to burden my poor Mother with the need to make each of us our own personal dozen to enjoy at every gathering, we gathered in the kitchen this morning to attempt mastery of the chocolate-tipped cookie.

Let's see, ingredients: half a cup of cornstarch, half a cup of confectioners sugar, three-quarters cup of margarine, and one cup of all-purpose four. Combine, then chill for one hour. Shape into individual short tubes and flatten each with a fork. Bake for 25 minutes at 300 degrees. Let them cool. Melt some semi-sweet chocolate in a bowl and gently dip each end in the chocolate. Place on wax paper and cool until the chocolate has hardened.

So simple, yet the simplest things always are the easiest to mess up. We had our moments of doubt.

They're too big! The dough is crumbling! Do we have enough chocolate?!

After baking, the cookie looked like the real thing. And after a couple dips in microwaved chocolate, it seemed as though we were nearing the finish line. All we had to do was wait for them to harden up. In the end, our tastebuds confirmed we had achieved perfection. The taste, the texture, the look of it -- all led us to cookie nirvana.

To know I have the knowledge and skill to teach our children and, God willing, our grandchildren how to make the perfect chocolate-tipped cookie fills me with tremendous pride. Who knows? Maybe someday soon I'll be confident enough to take a crack at the sauerbraten.



© 2010 Mark Feggeler