After a long hiatus, I've returned with nothing but good intentions in mind. This year my resolution is to attempt to post at least once a week here with something I've done, something on my mind, or a recipe or something of the sort. I really slacked off the latter half of the year, something that the four people who read this let me know that I'd been remiss in doing anything with this space. To be fair, it wasn't out of malicious intent or anything of the sort - things have been difficult down here in the Nickel City homestead, and a lot of my drive has evaporated under an avalanche of different emotions.
That's not a good thing, of course. I'm a very internal person - things that bother me get bottled up and held inside until I go critical, and lose my composure in a messy meltdown. I've been concentrating on improving that, of course, but it's never an easy road. I've always had issues with anxiety and depression, and sometimes (well, let's be honest, often) I let it get the better of me.
This year I resolved not to lose weight, or travel the world, or write a novel - although I am trying to be careful of what I eat and lose weight, it's not a driving 'I must lose x by y date' because that intimidates me - but to do smaller things and actually achieve them. I don't like to fail, and setting myself up for failure by setting lofty goals with no steps in-between is the fastest way to get me to not push myself to get to that end goal.
So, my basic resolutions are thus:
1. Here's the big one: Update this blog at least once every seven days with real content! For real, I want to do this regularly. Once a week can't be that bad, right?
2. Write and complete the NaNoWriMo challenge this year. I failed last year, and I don't want to have it happen again.
3. Complete last year's NaNoWriMo attempt before November. It stopped at about 22,000 words before I came undone. I can do this!
4. Get a job. This one sadly is still very dependent on US Immigration sending me my papers, and out of my hands - and has been the prevalent source of my depression and anxiety. If this gets cleared up, things will get so much better. (Anyone know anyone in the department that can hurry my paperwork along? It's been almost a year.)
5. Develop and keep faith, pride and joy in myself, instead of beating myself up like a punching bag all the time. It's no secret to those that know me that I hate myself more than, well, most anything - and when things go wrong I beat myself up until my psyche is a crumpled, ruined heap on the floor of my brain. I don't really know how to go around to achieving this, but I think if I approach life trying to focus on being kinder to myself I'll figure it out along the way.
So there. I don't think this is impossible to do - do you?
2010 was a year of change. The first half of the year was full of hope and excitement, but the second half was full of difficult challenges. 2011 is starting off where 2010 left off, and things are still very hard. Lots of uncertainty and impatience on my end, but Carl is doing his very best to keep me sane, and keep things working here. I can only hope that soon I'll be able to contribute more than a clean house and a hot dinner - I'd feel worlds better about myself when I can.
Speaking of hot dinners, as some of you may be aware, I love to cook and bake. My favourite hang-out on the Something Awful Forums holds contests. Some of you may remember my attempt at entering their 'Newbie Iron Chef Something Awful' contest with crepes two ways. Suffice it to say there were over 55 entries and I came in at the middle of the pack, something like 20th place. Not terrible, of course, but not a finalist either. I was a little disappointed, but I tried my best and I learned new things in the kitchen. There's nothing wrong with that!
Another contest, this one for the more seasoned competitors (and simply called Iron Chef Something Awful, or ICSA) was announced: holiday traditions! I was very excited to enter, but things changed very dramatically when my Grandma - dad's mom - passed away very suddenly on December 6th after a very brief fight with liver cancer. It changed my world, I'm not afraid to admit, and my ICSA entry reflects that.
My first post for 2011, then, is the entry I submitted for consideration in ICSA 45: Season's Eatings, which I now put here for you to see without having to pay $10 to register on the forums.
Please note that there is some bad language behind this cut, and a LOT of pictures, but if that doesn't intimidate you, then read on!
note: forgive me if the pictures aren't properly fitting in the context of my blog layout, these are linked elsewhere and I was too lazy to upload them to Blogger. I'm new to this whole thing, so bear with me and let me know if you need a certain picture or whatnot.
I love Christmas. There's something about the combination of cold days and hot ovens that makes me want to stay in the kitchen and bake as much as I can. This year almost all of my gifts were homemade – either fancy paper ornaments or baked goods, or a combination of both. I live in Buffalo, New York right now but I'm originally from Toronto, Ontario. I moved here to marry my husband in March, and I'm still waiting on the paperwork that allows me to return home.
Sadly, it did not arrive for Christmas. As a result, I had to ship everything back home, and thought, "Oh, that's not an issue, I'll see everyone for next Christmas".
I promise, there's a reason for backstory. Bear with me.
Back in the beginning of December, I was just finishing a batch of vanilla caramels when I came to sit down and read GWS. When I saw bartolimu's ICSA post I decided I was going to jump in with both feet, and I started making grand plans: I was going to make all these types of cookies and I would take pictures forever until they were perfect on my old digital camera and--
My phone rang. It was my mother. She was pretty torn up, as she was assigned the unhappy job of calling me to tell me my Grandma had passed away. She had been diagnosed only two weeks earlier with liver cancer. Just after Thanksgiving (Canadian Thanksgiving, in October), she had felt short of breath when out for a walk, and had gone to see a doctor. A round of tests later came back with the dire news: it was terminal. The doctors had said she'd be there for Christmas.
I got the call December 6.
It sort of put a damper on the holiday for me.
I was grateful that by all accounts she just simply went in her sleep, peaceful and quiet. I had spoken to her only a few days earlier via Skype, and told her I loved her. She had sounded so weak and scattered – this woman was always firm, and forceful, and direct. Naturally when someone you're close to passes away, you do a little reflecting back, and I realized that while years had put some distance between her and I, a lot of my Christmas memories were indelibly linked to her in my mind.
I grieved for a little while – maybe I still am – but I knew that she'd be annoyed if I sat around moping and crying all day. She didn't hold much water for that kind of thing, and was very much a “bootstraps” kind of woman. Not being able to go to the funeral due to the travel restrictions on my situation (thanks, Immigration!) had really upset me, and I wanted to do something to remember her by, and to show people what she had given me.
That's when I figured out what I was going to do for my entry. This is meant to be a celebration of good memories, and some of my family's favourite treats – there's nothing sophisticated about what we make; it's all about tradition. It just happens to be tasty.
Join me as I muddle my way around my kitchen with my middling skills (and expert aspirations), make about a billion mistakes and messes while doing so, then take pictures of it all and put it on the internet for all to see.
ICSA 45: Old Recipes, New Memories
Icebox Cookies
Marzipan Bars
Gingerbread House (and Accidental Cookies)
ICEBOX COOKIES
I knew it was officially Christmas when I'd go to her house as a wee kid and snoop through the 'cookie cabinet' – she had a shelf at kid-height that usually had two or three tins of cookies, some store-bought and some homemade – and find these there. I never liked maraschino cherries, and honestly I still don't, but diced up into these cookies I don't find them abhorrent.
This is as close to a 'recipe' as we ever got from her, written down on my mom's recipe card. Just a list of ingredients and a bake temperature/time. To note, the 'nuts' are traditionally walnuts, and the 'cheeries' (oh God my mother can't spell) are maraschino cherries in red and green. I know, green cherries, what the fuck – these are hard as BALLS to find, and as long as I can remember I've always struggled to find them in stores. We found some (not maraschino, but I think they were glace) green cherries in Wegmans entirely by accident, so when I was making round 2 (and took the final photos) you'll see that some are of only red-cherry dough, and some include both colours of cherries. It doesn't matter, of course. The procedure's still all the same!
I was going to stick with the recipe faithfully, but it seemed kind of gross to me to use nothing but shortening in the cookies. I decided to go with a half-and-half mix, mostly because I didn't remember them tasting like Crisco, but maybe that was what was needed to give them their consistency.
Gotta have yer ingredient money shot.
Before you start actually baking, though, cut the hell out of your cherries. Dice them really fine if you're like me and you don't like big chunks of them, or rough chop them if you do.
End up looking like you pinched someone to death.
Cream together the butter and shortening in your mixer. I have a deep, abiding love for my KitchenAid mixer than my husband has to compete with. If you use only shortening or only butter, of course, you can skip this step.
After scraping down the sides of the bowl, add in the egg and mix again.
Once the egg and butter/shortening/whatever combination has been mixed together well, add in your brown sugar. The first batch of cookies I made, and the ones I took the most pictures of, used dark brown sugar. The second batch used light brown sugar, but I didn't like the way they came out – they were more crispy and less soft, and I wonder if that's a caramelization thing but I don't really know, nor do I know which one Grandma used the most. I think dark brown is the best way to go, though.
Mix it all together really well, until it's a buttery sweet paste. Don't forget to add your vanilla like I did – but I did it at this step, so everything was fine.
While that's going on, though, get your dry ingredients together in a medium bowl, and just stir it a bit.
Add the flour to the wet mixture. If you're me, dump it all in at once and realize you spilled a bunch on the other side of the bowl. Swear a few times, get the feeling that Grandma would not approve of so much cussin', and sweep up the flour to dump back into the bowl. Engage the mixer once more and swear again, flinching as you do so and apologize mentally when the flour comes flying up out of the bowl in a white plume because you're an idiot and slid the switch to the next lowest setting first after 'stir'.
Fuck.
Sorry, Grandma.
Well, dust yourself off and mix everything together. The dough is going to be a bit crumbly-looking, but that's okay.
Add in your cherries and nuts at this point. Although there's no hard and set rule for how much to add, for a single batch of cookies you're probably looking at about a half-cup of cherries and a half-cup of nuts. Naturally you can adjust the proportions any way you like, but about a cup total of the add-ins should be what you're aiming for.
Mix it all together. The dough will be a little less crumbly, and here's where I noticed a difference between batches. The glace-like cherries in this batch didn't make the dough quite as wet as the maraschino cherries did, nor did the cookies have the same flavour with the glace cherries. I think in the future I'll just stick with the wet, over-dyed cherries for my purposes.
Once the dough's mixed up, tear off a few sheets of wax paper and lay them out on a clean work surface. Take a decent-sized handful of dough and roll/mold it into a log-shape. You can make it as big around or as long as you want.
Do your best not to make any crude comments about what it looks like, because you just know Grandma would not approve.
Fuck it. Make the comments to yourself. Snicker like a six year old anyway.
Roll the dough up in the wax paper – I fold in the vertical sides first, then roll the dough up to keep the ends from going all crusty and dry. Stick it in the fridge for a few hours, although overnight is best. If you're in a hurry, throw it in the freezer for a couple hours instead. If you're me, you throw it into the fridge and go do some other Christmas stuff, while thinking about what you're going to do next, and thinking about the person who introduced the cookies to you.
Grandma made icebox cookies every Christmas for her kids – my dad and his siblings. As far as I know, these are my father's favourite cookies. After my parents split up, my mom (whom my brother and I stayed with) didn't make these for years because green maraschino cherries are hard as hell to find everywhere (seriously, you'd have better luck looking for Waldo).
The divorce was tough on both sides of the family. The early visits with Grandma after the split were really, really difficult for me, and I was already an awkward teen when this was happening. For years I could barely talk about my father or be in the same room with him, and now that I look back on it I feel ashamed; Grandma would try to defend her son and I would vigorously refuse to hear it while defending my mom. I was a really stubborn teenager, what can I say?
Things got better, though. I grew up. My dad and I talk now, and I'm not angry at him or the situation anymore - we're not, perhaps, fairy-tale-ending close, but we're better than we were, and that actually makes me happy. Grandma changed too, and I learned to listen and compromise as well, which I so often refused to do on the subject. We mended fences over... well, over gingerbread. Which brings me to...
Gingerbread House (and accidental Cookies)
While I was a kid, and even a young teen, my Grandma would give me a call sometime during December and ask me if I wanted to come over and help make a gingerbread house with her for the family dinner at Christmas. This was really special to me because I was the only kid she did this with for a long time until she moved hours away, and tried to carry on the tradition there with my cousins.
These were, admittedly, kits made by Robin Hood, where the cookie mix was 'add butter, egg and milk' and away you went, and had all the candies and icing mix ready to go too. We could put one together during the course of a Saturday or Sunday, and while we waited for things to cool or set we'd go out to the living room and do something else. We'd play games (she was a beast at Scrabble), and she taught me how to knit, do counted cross-stitch and rug hooking. Right up until she died we talked about knitting in particular, and it's one of my favourite non-kitchen hobbies to this day.
Anyway! Since I'm generally against mixes, I figured that I'd have to start from scratch. When I saw NoSmoKing's thread on gingerbread houses I got excited, thinking I'd find a good edible cookie recipe there to build my house from. Sadly, I did not.
Google to the rescue!
3-1/2 cups of flour
2 tsp of ground cinnamon
1-1/2 tsp of ground ginger
1 tsp of salt
1 tsp of baking soda
1 tsp of ground allspice
1 cup of butter or margarine, softened – I can't ever imagine using margarine in baking, ugh
1 cup of firmly packed brown sugar
1 tsp of vanilla
1/3 cup of molasses
2 whole eggs
You may notice that there's double the ingredients there. There's a funny story behind that. See, I took the template from one recipe that didn't sound as good, and applied it to this recipe. The pattern-recipe called for 6 cups of flour, while this one (which lacked a pattern) did not. So me, in my brilliance, had the following series of thoughts:
Hey, this recipe looks like it's half as big as the other. I know, I'll double it! At which point, I had the sneaky feeling of my Grandma watching – disapprovingly.
You're going to have too much dough, you know. That would be a waste. Pfft, I'll be fine.All right, if that's what you think! But it's not going to fit in your mixer. Aw... sure, it's seven cups of flour and two cups of butter, but my mixer's got a ten-cup bowl! It can totally handle it! I did not help raise you to be so dumb.
Grandma! You're going to do it anyway, aren't you? It'll be fine! My mixer is awesome.
Mix flour, cinnamon, ginger, salt, baking soda and allspice in medium (or large, in my case) bowl.
Jesus Christ that's a lot of butter. Get the slight feeling that maybe ghost-in-your-head-Grandma had a point. Ignore it, and push forward.
Beat butter, sugar and vanilla in large bowl with mixer for about five minutes or until mixture is light and fluffy. Mixture will not be completely smooth, to put it mildly, but it will be a lighter, creamier consistency.
Add your eggs and molasses and beat until blended, and scrape down the side of the bowl once.
oh my god what is this i don't even
Beat in flour mixture at low speed until well blended.
Well, try to. It's at this point I realized I have run into a problem: that's only half my flour in the mixing bowl, and another half a bowl left to be blended in. My mixer is throwing up half-floured sticky chunks of dough over the side, and realization settles in.
Oh my God I should have made this in two batches. Told ya so!Moral of the story: GRANDMA IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
Sigh deeply, find the biggest mixing bowl you've got, scrape out the mixer bowl into it, and add the rest of your flour. Find your biggest wooden spoon and start stirring. At one point end up on the floor with the bowl between your knees and stirring with both hands because your arms are going to fall off after ten minutes of churning like four pounds of fucking gingerbread dough and why didn't I listen to you voice-in-my-head-that-sounded-like-Grandma aaaaaaa
This is after ten minutes. KEEP STIRRING. You wanted to work out more anyway, right fatty?
Eventually get everything mixed properly. Break the dough up into three parts, form into flattened mounds and wrap tightly in saran wrap. This needs to refrigerate as well for about two hours or so. The dough is REALLY sticky and wet, but resist the urge to add more flour now.
Have a little fun with it.
While your dough is chilling next to the icebox cookie dough, go out to your front room and make the pattern for the house while wondering if maybe, just maybe, you made a little too much dough, then promptly forget about it while drawing your pattern out. I decided that for my first attempt at doing this, I'd go with something simple and low-fuss: a basic house shape like the ones from my childhood. The sizes I used were the following:
Roof: 2 rectangles, 7" x 11"
Side walls: 2 rectangles, 5" x 8"
Front and Back: base 5", total height 9" – 5" straight-sided, then taper for 4" to meet at the top. Cut the door out of the front side.
Chimney: front 2.5" tall, back 1.5" tall, sides cut on a bias to fit on the roof.
Wrap a sturdy but battered old cookie sheet in tinfoil – or piece of plywood, or tray, or whatever you've got that will make a good solid base for your house.
After finishing this, pull out the gingerbread (don't worry, we'll get back to the icebox cookies later). Preheat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Flour your workspace like crazy because this is thirsty, thirsty dough and it will stick to everything if you let it. Roll one of the chunks out to about 1/8” thickness.
Lay out pieces of your pattern, but remember what parts you need to do two of. I used a pizza cutter to cut the pieces out, finding it gave me a straighter line.
Bake the pieces for about ten minutes, or until golden brown. I had some trouble with the roof tiles because I rolled them out a little thicker than 1/8” and they took longer to bake. I watched them like a hawk, but they got a touch darker along the edges. I figured it'd be okay, since they needed to support a bunch of icing and candies and whatnot.
After cutting out all your pieces of your house, realize you have a metric shitload of dough left over and yes – doubling the recipe was a bad idea. Well... sort of bad. This just means you get to make cookies with an adorable cookie cutter that you found in your Christmas boxes that your mom packed for you to make your newlywed home all cute and shit during the holidays.
Get used to seeing these cute rocking horses, because... the leftover dough? Yeah, there was enough to make SIX DOZEN of the fuckers. It took me a couple days to bake through them all. I ended up giving nearly all of them away as gifts, at potluck lunches, at family dinner... basically if I had to bring something? I brought a lot of gingerbread cookies.
Lesson learned, though!
If you have to do any trimming of your gingerbread – like I did, because in the brief space between being moved from the board to the pan everything warped, and my pans are apparently bent so things baked up on slants – do it while it's hot and use a sharp knife so that it cuts away mostly cleanly. The raw edges are going to end up being slathered in royal icing, which is okay, so it doesn't matter if they're a little rough. This isn't for some kind of Food Network bake-off for ten grand, it's for my husband's family. I can hide anythingunder royal icing.
Speaking of icing... go make some!
Royal Icing
3 egg whites
1 1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar
3 - 3 1/2 cups icing sugar
Basically this stuff is edible(?) cement. I made this one batch at a time so it wouldn't end up drying out; ultimately I only had to make two batches. I kept it useable for a few days by pressing saran wrap against the surface of the icing everywhere, then wrapping the tip of the pastry bag I was using in more wrap, then putting it in the bowl on top of the icing. Then I wrapped the mouth of the bowl and minimized the amount of air that was going to come in contact with it, then threw it into the fridge. It's really easy to make.
All you have to do is beat the egg whites until they begin to foam. Add the cream of tartar and beat until the whites are stiff, but not dry. Slowly beat in the icing sugar, beating for about 5 minutes until it reaches spreading consistency.
Like this.
Okay! Now that the gingerbread's cooled and ready to go, let's build this bastard. I remember having to use all four hands when my Grandma and I would do this – and she would put it together, holding it still and I would stand around asking, “Is it ready yet? Can I decorate it now? What about now?”
Let's montage the construction process. This also includes the chimney being built – which looked far better when I put it together, only to have that shit fall apart because it wasn't dry yet. Fuck! It didn't look as neat when I put it together the second time.
Use your coffee mugs to balance the roof tiles in place, and then – hands sticky and stiff from being covered in royal icing – keep resisting the urge to make more dirty comments because Grandma still wouldn't approve and let it set for a day or so. The icing's going to turn into something so hard that you could probably sharpen a piece of it and cause grievous bodily harm with your sugar-shiv.
Call it a day, and get back in there the next day for the last thing you need to make, because Christmas isn't Christmas with your family until these appear on the dessert tray. I can even remember the pans that Grandma used to make these in – I think my mother ended up inheriting them because these are probably, hands down, my father's favourite baked good ever. The pans were made by my Grandpa when he did sheet metal work, and they showed every last bit of their age.
Marzipan Bars
This is my Nana (Grandma's mom), me, and Grandma. I am very young in this picture, and very tight-curled perms were very popular then. Nana made these bars that we all called 'marzipan', and for years this is what I figured real marzipan was like, not the delicious almond paste that I've come to love. I realize now that the internet is a repository for ludicrous amounts of information, but for years the only recipe I'd ever seen for these was this old, handwritten card that my Nana wrote out and passed to Grandma, who passed it to my mom.
This recipe is for a single 8” x 8” pan of the bars. I made two pans, so... double it accordingly. Trust me when I say this is something you want to do in separate batches if you're doubling. You'll see why in a moment.
To start, make a basic pie crust dough – my mom used to use a box mix which would result in a double-batch of marzipan bars. I, however, went out on a limb and faced my fears of pie crust head-on, making it from scratch. I used this recipe which is just flour, ice water, shortening and salt. It was ... not easy! I kept worrying about overworking the dough, which I do all the time, and that the bottom was going to be this nasty, crusty cardboard thing. I made both crusts – one crust will line one pan.
Preheat your oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit.
Make sure your pan is greased and floured, then lay the pastry in the pan. Trim where necessary and add on the pastry to the corners you didn't roll out enough (damnit).
Cover the pastry with jam, either raspberry or strawberry – unfortunately my husband had a :downs: moment and bought strawberry preserves instead of jam. I tried not to use chunks of berries when I smeared it everywhere, but when I did run into one I just kind of picked it apart to make it spread better. I will say that in the finished product it was kind of tasty to hit a full strawberry with the rest of the cake, but next time I think I'll just stick with raspberry and damn the seeds.
Cream together the butter and sugar until fluffy, then add the eggs and mix well. Once it's all well blended, add the almond flavouring (use the real stuff, it makes a huge difference), rice flour and salt. The dough is going to look a little weird – like it's curdled, almost. This is okay. It is in fact natural.
Make a second batch exactly like the first if you're doubling the recipe, or split the single batch into two bowls.
Find your food colouring, and wonder what the hell happened to your green because apparently it's trying to escape everywhere. Red and green are the classic colours, although I do remember one year where there was no green colouring and we ended up with red and yellow. THIS IS WRONG. Red and green only, damnit.
For years our family would resort to dumping in ridiculous amounts of food colouring out of those little bottles that McCormick sells to get something that was pastel pink instead of red, and mint green instead of something darker. These days, we've discovered paste colour and the food no longer tastes funny. Who knew?
This is why you should make it in two batches if you're doubling the recipe. You don't have to worry about having more of one colour, because both are exactly the same. This appeals to my sense of symmetry. Also, those colours are true to life. This shit is bright, and it's awesome. Stir it up until it's evenly distributed.
The traditional way to make marzipan bars is to lay it out in a checkerboard pattern, using about a heaping teaspoon of batter per square. This is a fun thing to do with two people – each one takes a colour and goes to town. I remember doing this with my mom as a kid, and one of us ending up with green fingers, the other with red fingers, from spooning out the batter. Don't worry too hard about there being tiny gaps between dollops, because it'll get hot and melt together, sealing up the holes.
Bake for about 30-35 minutes. Check after 30 with a toothpick.
It looks pretty ugly when it's baked, but that's okay. We're going to cover the tops with icing once the cake is cool.
I never realized it until recently, but it's just a buttercream on top of the marzipan: a bit of milk, butter, icing sugar all whipped up until it's a decent consistency. I always thought it was something unique to the recipe, but it's not. (I'm honestly kind of late to the actual world of cooking. I just bang around in my kitchen and experiment, or make old recipes from memory rather than recognizing where they originated from.) You want the frosting a touch stiff for spreading, but not too stiff or it'll just rip up the top of the cake and you'll get crumbs everywhere in your frosting, which isn't as pretty.
Cut into little squares – about petit four size – and refrigerate in an air-tight container.
Icebox Cookies – Back Again
While your oven is hot, by the way, go get your icebox cookies. Remember those? Yeah. We're going to finish those! Fortunately they've been chilling for like a day in the fridge and are at the perfect consistency and temperature for baking them up.
Turn the oven down to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
Pull out a tube of cookie dough and slice it into about 1/2” slices with a good, sharp knife. Remember, it has to cut through some walnuts and if you use a shitty knife you're going to make a mess of the cookies.
These do spread, so space them evenly apart – this was about a perfect set-up for them. They bake for about ten minutes. You don't want them to be crunchy or crispy. If tapped with a fingertip, they should feel a tiny bit squishy, or underbaked. They're meant to be a bit soft, so once they're cooled put them in an air-tight container or a ziploc bag or something like that.
Gingerbread House (and Accidental Cookies) – the Decorating
I'll admit – I have no design aesthetic when it comes to decorating gingerbread houses. I fell back on the child who was a pro at this kind of thing, and went basic. Also, I have no skill and it was late at night, so I just went off the cuff. My only rule was that I had to see gingerbread on the house, and that it wasn't just covered in a royal icing shell.
The fun part of decorating a house that's not in a kit is that you can pick and choose your candies at will. Since I don't like most candy (I'm a chocolate girl), I stuck with M&Ms in plain and peanut, some Guittard melty mints, some gumdrops and some candy canes. Hey, if I'm decorating this thing, I'm going to use what I like. :v:
These icicles were a bitch to do, but I managed. After doing the roof tiles, it was pretty late at night, I was tired, my back hurt, and I was out of royal icing. Being so late at night, I thought it'd be rude to fire up the mixer and make another batch, since I'd probably wake the neighbours up. I figured that I'd do the rest later before the family dinner I was taking it to, when I could make the icing during the day.
Well... I forgot to do it until about two hours before the dinner. Shit.
Cue me whipping up a new batch of royal icing, throwing candies like ninja stars at the house. Also cue me trying not to hear Grandma clicking her tongue disapprovingly, while I tried frantically to take some final pictures of the haul I had slaved over for the past weeks.
The icebox cookies are not super-sweet. They're a soft cookie, where the nuts and cherries act as little spots of crunchy and sweet respectively in each mouthful.
The marzipan are dense little bites of almond-flavoured cake, with sweet icing on top and crispy, light pastry on the bottom. The rice flour makes a heavier cake than regular flour, so all you need is a little bite-sized piece to enjoy the moist, sweet, almondy richness.
The gingerbread cookies are far better after sitting and ... well, I guess 'going stale' isn't a very nice thing to call it, but that's what it's doing, really. A cookie out of the oven tasted bland, but after a week it had a nice, rich spiciness to it that actually tasted like gingerbread.
Epilogue and Embarrassing Family Portrait
Christmas is over, now, and everything's been given away and eaten up by friends and family. I introduced the husband's family to my traditions, and while there was more dessert than dinner, I'm pleased to say that my marzipan bars and icebox cookies were devoured. The house wasn't touched, though, which was disappointing but these things happen. I introduced my in-laws to some things important to me, and that felt pretty awesome.
The memorial service was in a little town close to where my Grandma lived in for the past fifteen years or so, near where a whole bunch of my father's family lives. Her ashes will be buried next to Grandpa in the town cemetary in the spring, when the ground thaws. I wasn't able to attend the service, so I guess that this is the next best thing I can offer: tell the internet all about it.
This was in the heyday of my childhood, before we all drifted off to our own lives and big get-togethers were fewer and further between. This was a time where I made gingerbread houses, played Scrabble, made dinosaur ornaments out of felt, and learned to knit from a patient woman who went outside of her usual habits to find time for her eldest granddaughter, even during the most turbulent family times.
Love you and miss you, Grandma.
Anyway! Thank you for reading this ridiculously long entry, and I wish you all a happy, healthy new year!
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