I started baking my annual Christmas cookies today. I decided to improvise a little bit with the recipe (always dangerous) and I threw in some orange and lemon zest, some candied peel and a teeny tiny pinch of ground cloves and cayenne pepper.
I met up with my ex-consultancy colleagues earlier today. I’ll write more about that tomorrow in another post (too tired now) but it involved three gin and tonics, and when I got home I had a glass of wine, so, as well as experimenting with my recipe I was also drunk-baking. This could go one of two ways:
- fabulously innovative and unusual
- train wreck
Thankfully, from the taste of the dough (I ate lots), I could tell that the cookies would taste amazing. However for some unknown reason one of my baking trays has gone walkabout. I suspect Boyfriend has used it for something car or bike related. Anyway, one baking tray down I found I had a lot of dough (half of it is still in the fridge!) and not much space.
From what I remembered the cookies didn’t spread much, but because the baking soda was out of date I added perhaps a smidge more than I usually would. We’re talking an extra pinch here, not an extra teaspoon. Anyway, I cut out lots of cookies with my festive cookie-cutters (comprising shapes of a christmas tree, an angel, a reindeer, Father Christmas, a holly leaf, a candy cane and a snowman) and lined them up as usual and put the trays in the oven.
I poured myself another glass of wine and sat on the floor in front of the oven to watch the cookies bake (experience has told me that this is the only way to bake Christmas cookies – they go from undercooked to burned in a microsecond so constant surveillance is necessary). After about five minutes I noticed they were getting fat. Uh-oh. After eight minutes they were all merging into one giant shape.
When I took them out of the oven at 1o minutes the cookies had become a giant mass of spiced Latvian gingerbread. I used a knife to try and cut the shapes back in, but they look fairly odd. The taste however, yum yum. I have surprised myself with my culinary innovation. The candied peel and zest makes the spiciness of the cookies a bit more palatable.
The cookies are stacked up on a cooling rack just now, waiting for tomorrow evening when I will try and make them into reasonably pretty Christmas cookies using coloured designer icing. Wish me luck.
As I said, I still have half the dough in the fridge. I think I will buy another baking tray tomorrow so I don’t have deformed cookies out of the second batch too!
They taste fab, and, as long as you use your imagination, will look fab too. It’s almost Christmas!!!!
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