This past weekend was cookie weekend at my house. This consists of copious amounts of flour, sugar, fat, and drinks at the end of the day because you deserve them for all your “hard” work. And, as we might remember, I wear an apron. It is serious business.
This year, just as last year, I was baking in preparation for a friend’s cookie exchange. Again, the idea of an exchange is quite girlie (or worse, boring) but it’s actually everything opposite of that women-in-the-kitchen stereotype that springs to mind. Instead, when we walk in the door, the hostess meets us with a glass of wine and then starts massaging our tired-from-baking shoulders. Okay, not that last part, but it’s going to be funny should her husband read this because in his mind, when he leaves the house, at any minute he could walk back in to fifteen drunk women giggling and baking in the kitchen. Naked.
For some reason, this year, I felt some need for cookie balance. The first cookie, my all-time favorite cookie, had to be the Snickerdoodle. Not only has it taken me twenty-eight years to admit that if this cookie were a god I’d worship at it’s altar, in spite of the ridiculous name. But it is good, it is simple, it is awesome. And adding entire sticks of butter to food just makes me feel good.
Easily amused, though, I’m still in awe that the whole thing starts with just ingredients.
Or maybe it’s the part about it being my ingredients, and that I’m the one turning it into food. I’m the contradictory cook/baker: always claiming that cooking is easy for the most part, and in the same breath in awe that anything turns out edible at all. The Snickerdoodles, though, are easy, and perfect. You roll them in sugar and cinnamon, need I say more? I think you could roll just about anything in sugar and cinnamon and I’d eat it. With a tall glass of milk for dunking.
I also tell myself quite often that I want a Kitchen Aid mixer, and as soon as I break my addiction to new running shoes or new camera lenses or beaches, I’ll get one. But that never happens, which is more shocking to me than it is to you, I’m sure. Instead I suffer through and call hand mixing eight batches of cookie dough Project: Holiday Stress Relief. Now you’re starting to see why drinks come at the end of the day.
And along with my “tradition” of having to burn one sheet of cookies every year, I also have the more purposeful tradition of baking one batch of cookies on an old Bake King cookie sheet I found—still in it’s box— when I moved into this house. The cookie sheet is easily older than I am, and I tell myself that I must use it because the woman that lived here before me never got around to it. So on special occasions, and once a year for Christmas, I break out the Bake King for it’s chance to shine. I also tell myself that it’s got to be good karma, to take one person’s baking intentions and create your own.
My Snickerdoodle recipe can be found back over here.
The second part of my 2007 Cookie Event, and the part where the whole balance thing comes in, was Pumpkin Oatmeal Cookies. These cookies, in spite of sounding very festive to me, are the opposite of many of the things that adds up to equal a good holiday cookie. There is very little flour and sugar, even less fat and, oh my heck, no butter! Not even a little bit. But as a woman, a woman without the metabolism of a bumble bee, a woman who’s already running thirty miles a week, when a recipe says “1.5 grams of fat,” I’m listening.
Much of the flavor in this “cookie” (yes, it’s time to start using the quotation marks) is from the pumpkin, as it well should be.
In a double batch, you’ll use two cans of pumpkin (about three cups). That, along with the nutmeg and cinnamon and cloves, is going to make you feel like you’re eating a holiday treat. There’s no way you can combine those ingredients and not feel like you are smack in the middle of Festivus. Or something like it.
And then you add the oatmeal, which is where, if you’re me, you start freaking out because you don’t have a mixing bowl large enough for a double batch of this stuff. Then you start questioning why, at twenty-eight, when you are consistently baking every year and many times throughout the year, don’t you have a bigger mixing bowl? What is wrong with you? You are a baking failure, with the ingredients spilling over the side, and still having not yet added the pumpkin. Dang it.
After more stress-relief hand mixing, though, it all worked out. Sure, we might be finding rolled oats all over the kitchen for years to come, but what a nice memory it’ll bring back.
The “cookies” themselves, though, were just good. They were not anywhere near my idea of a perfect Christmas cookie; they were more like breakfast. In fact, they have been my breakfast for the past two days. With 1.5 grams of fat, 4 grams of protein and about 120 calories, I at least feel like I’m not going to overdose on all the other holiday food that’s around. So maybe they’re not my idea of perfect, but they are some semblance of it. Any food that doesn’t bring guilt along with it is is it’s own kind of perfect.
You can find the low-fat Pumpkin Oatmeal cookie recipe here. It is not the recipe I had initially but it’s nearly a replica save for the raisins because, ew, so not my idea of fun. Like I needed those flying around the kitchen.
I thought twice about bringing them to the party—if they weren’t stacking up to my standards, how were they going to fare with fourteen other women, some of whom live to bake? When it came down to it, though, I remembered that these women are all a lot like me. Sure, some of them are self-proclaimed Martha Stewart protégés, but that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking about holiday weight gain just like the rest of us (read: me). And I was right, even if it just means we’re all in a little bit of denial, there’s nothing wrong with a few healthy “cookies” to balance out those entire sticks of butter.
These last two photos were taken with my snobby friend’s snobby iPhone. Not so perfect on the close-ups, but you get the idea.
P.S. I love my snobby friends.
