We have a cookie exchange at work next week. Normally, I'd write about that next week, but I'm in a kind of grumpy mood tonight and I'd rather write about something cheery.
We mostly ate boughten cookies, rather than homemade ones, when I was growing up. Mom was (and still is) very fond of Mallomars, which are fun to eat if you do it the childish way and chip off the chocolate, then eat the marshmallow, and finally eat the chocolate covered cookie bottom. It's a kind of demolition along the lines of what one does with Oreos, of course. Oddly, I remember preferring non-chocolate sorts of cookies. I still like the whole sugar wafer family of things, but my true addiction were to egg kichel. Nowadays I get them only at Passover and I can still eat way more of them than I should, nibbling completely mindlessly.
In college, I discovered a higher class of cookies for purchase, in the form of Pepperidge Farm. Specifically, their "distinctive" collection, which had lots of chocolate things. My favorites from the store now, though, are these British ginger lemon cremes, which are expensive but worth it.
We also had bakery cookies (which, I guess, are still boughten, but are a higher class than supermarket boxed ones). Mostly, those came via my paternal grandfather. He brought a bakery box whenever he visited, mostly of bow ties. In fact, my brother and I distinguished him from our other grandfather by calling him Cookie Grandpa. (Mom's father was Jewelry Grandpa, since he had a jewelry store.)
The only time we had homemade cookies as children was right around Christmas. Mom made butter cookies to bring to parties our non-Jewish neighbors had. They were pretty standard butter cookies, but the key thing was shaping them, which Mom did with a cookie press. There were trees to decorate with green sugar and ribbons to scatter with sprinkles and sort of star shapes which got candy kisses in the middle. I'm not sure if Mom still has the cookie press, though I am sure she hasn't used it in years.
I'm torn about what to bake for the exchange. I bought some white and dark swirl chocolate chips, which just looked too cute. But do I use a chocolate base or a plain one? I also want to do some cookie cutter cookies because I have a large collection of cookie cutters that I hardly use. Again, there are decisions. Do I want to do plain butter ones or something with some spices in them or something with different colors?
It's not like these are exactly earth-shattering choices, but life was a lot easier back when Mom knew one cookie recipe and never seemed tempted to try anything else.
Copyright 2006 Miriam H. Nadel