The start of cookie madness
I have been falling behind in my blog postings because I have spent the past two days assisting my two crazy sisters while they bake approximately thirty thousand cookies. This was a tradition started by our grandma Norma, and has been taken over by my sister Lori after Gram passed away a few years ago.
Until this year I had never been a participant in the cookie madness; I had just been a gluttonous recipient of one of the enormous tubs that marks the fruits of their labor. The way it works is this: in the week prior to Thanksgiving, my sisters gather their friends and family in the Ramekins kitchen and start baking horrifying quantities of many, many different kinds of cookies. On the first night (Saturday), we baked chocolate chip, chocolate walnut chip, chocolate chip coconut pecan, cranberry, and one other kind that I have totally forgotten. Yesterday evening we worked on snickerdoodles, tropical cookies (orange and coconut; these taste like pina coladas to me and, unlike the grapefruit macaroons, I’m not a fan), plain shortbread, brown sugar shortbread, ginger shortbread, chocolate shortbread, lime zest, and lemon pecan shortbread. Then they pack them all up and ship them to hundreds of people. This year they’re even sending a bunch to Marines in Iraq.
I have never worked in an institutional bakery before, and after these last few days I think I can safely rule that out as a potential career. After hours of scooping tiny balls of dough and standing up all day (I had a shift at work prior to the baking), I awoke early Sunday morning with a massive charley horse. While I was stretching it out, I also discovered that overnight my scooping hand had permanently clenched itself into a painful claw.
It’s fun to work alongside my sisters, but the cookie baking process tends to bring out sides to their personalities that I’ve never seen before. My normally sweet pastry chef sister, Lisa, becomes all business and derides us for our sloppy cookie slicing techniques, slow scooping abilities, and my own personal tendency to move sluggishly when not actively assigned to a task. This causes Lori, who is almost always sarcastic and mocking even outside the cookie kitchen, to chant things like “Lisa is a Nazi” under her breath as she counts cookies. By the end of the first day, we had baked 4000 cookies. By the end of the second, the count was up to 10,000. Luckily my plane for Chicago leaves tomorrow, or I would certainly be pressed into service for the most complicated cookies such as the miniature pecan pies (Tea Time Tassies, I think they’re called), which need to be pressed individually into tiny tart pans. Ugh.
As we work, they sometimes share amusing anecdotes from my childhood that I’ve never heard before. For example, they used to wrap one of the cups of my mother’s enormous nursing bra around my head as a kind of cap. They also said that when I was about four or five, I stood up in a crowded ski lodge and shouted “PENIS!” much to their mortification, because they were thirteen and trying to flirt with boys. That has to be payback, since I’m sure they were the ones who taught me the word to begin with.
In other food-related news, I have a phone interview on Wednesday morning for a brand manager position with Annie’s Homegrown, the makers of the bunny-shaped organic mac and cheese that I am so fond of. They are based in Napa, which would be an even worse commute than what I have now, but I guess I shouldn’t count my free-range chickens before they are hatched.
Until this year I had never been a participant in the cookie madness; I had just been a gluttonous recipient of one of the enormous tubs that marks the fruits of their labor. The way it works is this: in the week prior to Thanksgiving, my sisters gather their friends and family in the Ramekins kitchen and start baking horrifying quantities of many, many different kinds of cookies. On the first night (Saturday), we baked chocolate chip, chocolate walnut chip, chocolate chip coconut pecan, cranberry, and one other kind that I have totally forgotten. Yesterday evening we worked on snickerdoodles, tropical cookies (orange and coconut; these taste like pina coladas to me and, unlike the grapefruit macaroons, I’m not a fan), plain shortbread, brown sugar shortbread, ginger shortbread, chocolate shortbread, lime zest, and lemon pecan shortbread. Then they pack them all up and ship them to hundreds of people. This year they’re even sending a bunch to Marines in Iraq.
I have never worked in an institutional bakery before, and after these last few days I think I can safely rule that out as a potential career. After hours of scooping tiny balls of dough and standing up all day (I had a shift at work prior to the baking), I awoke early Sunday morning with a massive charley horse. While I was stretching it out, I also discovered that overnight my scooping hand had permanently clenched itself into a painful claw.
It’s fun to work alongside my sisters, but the cookie baking process tends to bring out sides to their personalities that I’ve never seen before. My normally sweet pastry chef sister, Lisa, becomes all business and derides us for our sloppy cookie slicing techniques, slow scooping abilities, and my own personal tendency to move sluggishly when not actively assigned to a task. This causes Lori, who is almost always sarcastic and mocking even outside the cookie kitchen, to chant things like “Lisa is a Nazi” under her breath as she counts cookies. By the end of the first day, we had baked 4000 cookies. By the end of the second, the count was up to 10,000. Luckily my plane for Chicago leaves tomorrow, or I would certainly be pressed into service for the most complicated cookies such as the miniature pecan pies (Tea Time Tassies, I think they’re called), which need to be pressed individually into tiny tart pans. Ugh.
As we work, they sometimes share amusing anecdotes from my childhood that I’ve never heard before. For example, they used to wrap one of the cups of my mother’s enormous nursing bra around my head as a kind of cap. They also said that when I was about four or five, I stood up in a crowded ski lodge and shouted “PENIS!” much to their mortification, because they were thirteen and trying to flirt with boys. That has to be payback, since I’m sure they were the ones who taught me the word to begin with.
In other food-related news, I have a phone interview on Wednesday morning for a brand manager position with Annie’s Homegrown, the makers of the bunny-shaped organic mac and cheese that I am so fond of. They are based in Napa, which would be an even worse commute than what I have now, but I guess I shouldn’t count my free-range chickens before they are hatched.
posted by cindym at 11:31 AM
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