Contrary to modern nutritional knowledge, good old white sugar, white flour and butter nourish me in ways inexplicable except to the human heart.
This particular combo worked my mixing arms and rolling hands thoroughly last Christmas season. My recipe for holidays presents included mending a bruised heart by baking seasonal cookies for loved ones. I can’t say that rolling out batch after batch led me to any particular enlightenment, but the pleasures of sharing and re-affirming meaningful relationships stoked the embers of an as yet unlit but loving soul.
I researched the history of Christmas cookies before writing this blog, and found many a reference to tradition, passing wholesome hours baking with others, and recipes for spiced oddities that form no part of my own tradition. Being 
raised in a household with limited sugar input (mostly local honey), I was an eager cookie dough eater, an avid cookie bowl licker. My friends, the twin Kotoswki sisters, led me to salvation with their household’s dedication to sugary holiday concoctions.
We made multiple sugar doughs, in-between rounds of dress up, and assembled an entire counter’s worth of sprinkles, edible silver balls, chocolate kisses, and more. Then came the frosting. For this, Mrs. Kotowski was allowed into the kitchen, overeager to take control of the whirling mess quickly eroding any dreams she had of weekend peace. We went for multiple colors, and employed plastic sacks and cone tips, painting our cookies with sizeable sugar gobs.
When my mother died right before Christmas in 1991, the seemingly lifeless house quickly piled up with hams and soups, adults eager to assuage our grief by at least taking the burden of cooking from us. What they didn’t realize is that cooking was to be part of our healing. One of those bleak afternoons, my cousin Claire and my girlfriends joined my sister and I for the most mega of all cookie-a-thons. Photos from the event show us dancing with bowls of frosting, our faces smiling in genuine silly childhood joy, an emotion absent from most other days of that time.
Who received our creations, I have no idea. My memory of those days and months recalls few specific things, yet the colors and friendships circled round the porch table remain indelibly bright. Somewhat a tradition, but more of a gathering for distraction, that cookied afternoon assuaged my sister Anne and I for a small sugar high moment that all love is not lost in the departure of a mother.
And this year? My heart is full of love. There will be no baking to fill an emptiness. Rather, any combining of flour, sugar and butter will be for the happy reason of creating new traditions and new relationships. This week I will travel to meet my boyfriend’s family for the first time. We will cook meals together, get to know each other, and most certainly spend some kitchen hours with floured hands licking delicious bowls of cookie dough clean.
Here is a recipe I discovered last winter, spiced sparklingly with cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves. Dip in homemade eggnog during evenings of empty agendas. Dip in a morning hot cocoa when the snow plow is late in clearing the roads. And as the title of this piece may reflect, some good old Gabriel Garcia Marquez makes for excellent reading whilst attempting something so creative as cooking.
Speculaas – use a windmill cookie mold for the traditional look of this cookie
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Basic cookie dough (Toll House, but add 1/3 cup flour)
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1 cup dried currants
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2/3 cup walnuts or pecans, finely chopped
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1/4 cup packed brown sugar
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2 tsp apple pie spice
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3 Tbs granulated sugar
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1/2 cup + apple butter.
Directions: Beat the butter on medium high for 30 seconds; Add brown sugar, cinnamon, baking powder, nutmeg, cloves and salt, and mix a bit. Beat in the egg yolk and milk. Beat in as much as possible of the flour. Then divide the dough in half, cover and chill an hour. Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Press a small amount of dough in a lightly oiled cookie mold. Drop on a cookie sheet, and bake 8 to 10 minutes, until edges are golden. Cool. Use almond icing if you’d like to sweeten the deal.
For almond icing – stir together the following in a small mixing bowl: 1 cup sifted powdered sugar, ¼ tsp almond extract, and enough milk (3 – 4 tsp) to make icing drizzle consistency.
