Not To Be Trusted With Knives

Cyber Cookies ’09

December 17, 2009 by Beth

When we were little, my sister and I did a lot of baking with our mom.  At Christmastime, my Aunt Wendy would come over and we’d bake up a storm – cookies and squares and crazy concoctions from recipes in Canadian Living magazine.  I distinctly remember learning fractions in elementary school and thinking “this is SO EASY” because I’d already learned fractions in the kitchen, where everything is measured in 1/2s or 1/4s or 1/8ths of cups or teaspoons or tablespoons1 and if you want to double a recipe, or halve a recipe, you learn pretty quick how to deal with numerators and denominators.

As we got older, my sister and I both continued our love of baking and when we both had our own places and I still lived in Ontario, we’d go to one another’s apartments to do our Christmas baking today2.

Well, this year we’ve decided to resurrect our tradition of doing our Christmas baking together, despite the fact that we live thousands of miles apart.  So “together” in this case is being given a little assistance from the Internet, Skype and our respective MacBook Pros.  That’s right folks, I’m going to be baking at my house and Nancy & Madeline & my mom will be baking at Nancy’s house and the whole thing will happen on webcam!  While it’s not quite as good as in person3, it’s the best I’m going to get, so I’m going with it.

Thus far, my plans are to make:

• my famous shortbread cookies, using my Great Granny’s secret recipe4
• sugar cookies
• chocolate mice
• meringue snowmen5

Cyber Cookies ’09.
Saturday, December 19, 2009.
Toronto & Vancouver.

You know you are jealous.

1. and I remember at one point thinking that a teaspoon was the metric “version” of a tablespoon in the same way that a kilometre is the metric “version” of a mile [↩]
2. one year we made a gingerbread village and another year we made a kick ass gingerbread Christmas living room scene, complete with fireplace, rocking chair, cat on a rug and a table with cookies & milk put out for Santa [↩]
3. I’m not going to be able to eat any of their fine wares! [↩]
4. Great Granny entrusted my Aunt Wendy with the recipe and Aunt Wendy, in turn, entrusted me with the recipe.  I make these cookies every year and people always rave about them.  The kicker, though, is that I don’t like shortbreak cookies! [↩]
5. mostly because I bought a cartoon of egg whites to make the Royal Icing to decorate the gingerbread cookies that I made this week (as I wanted to give baking to some people I knew I was going to see this week, I have to do some baking prior to CyberCookies ’09) and I have to do something with all the extra egg whites.  But also because I feel the need to vindicate myself after the slight misshapen meringue ghosts I made earlier this year [↩]

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