Just eat the cookie.
Ana Pascal is right: everybody loves cookies, and if you’re looking for a good way to make the world a better place, you could do a lot worse than whipping up a batch of cookies.
I’m of the opinion that heaven probably smells like warm sugar cookies, that chocolate chips are one of God’s Top Ten inventions, and that oatmeal should only be consumed via cookie, either in the form of the no-bake, or (my favorite) a perfectly warm soft oatmeal raisin cookie.
Christmas got you feeling “wibbly wobbly”?
The holidays aren’t always the easiest time of the year. They seem to magnify and intensify everything without regard for the joy or depression they spread. In the rush and the stress and the traffic and the pressure to make it “The Best Christmas. Ever”, stop for a minute, smell the flours, and bake up some cookies. Take them over to a friend. Or, if you don’t have a friend, take them to an enemy (you might lose an enemy and gain a friend). Better yet, bake them with the children in your life, and then eat the entire batch while they’re still warm. You have my permission: go right ahead and spoil your supper. Because memories like that are important, and because, as Karen Eiffel discovered in “Stranger Than Fiction”, (which is in my Top Ten), it’s often the little things that make life beautiful. While you enjoy these cookies, stick in one of my Top Ten movies, or pick up…a good piece of fiction.
“As Harold took a bite of Bavarian sugar cookie, he finally felt as if everything was going to be ok. Sometimes, when we lose ourselves in fear and despair, in routine and constancy, in hopelessness and tragedy, we can thank God for Bavarian sugar cookies. And, fortunately, when there aren’t any cookies, we can still find reassurance in a familiar hand on our skin, or a kind and loving gesture, or subtle encouragement, or a loving embrace, or an offer of comfort, not to mention hospital gurneys and nose plugs, an uneaten Danish, soft-spoken secrets, and Fender Stratocasters, and maybe the occasional piece of fiction. And we must remember that all these things, the nuances, the anomalies, the subtleties, which we assume only accessorize our days, are effective for a much larger and nobler cause. They are here to save our lives. I know the idea seems strange, but I also know that it just so happens to be true. And, so it was, a wristwatch saved Harold Crick.”-from ‘Death and Taxes’, by Karen Eiffel
This is the Christmas cookie that disappears first around here. (You’re probably gonna have to go ahead and double the recipe. Fair warning.) Enjoy:
Pecan Tassies
In a glass mixing bowl, cream the following:
1/2 cup softened oleo (that’s butter, you Yankees. Not, I repeat, not, margarine. It’s Christmas, for Pete’s sake.)
3 oz. softened cream cheese.
Add a little at a time:
1 cup all-purpose unbleached flour
(You want a soft dough to form.) Cover dough and refrigerate at least one hour.
Leave kitchen. Wrap some presents. Run out for a yummy coffee. You’ve got an hour or so, and it’s the holidays: enjoy yourself. When you return:
Pre-heat oven to 350. Grease and flour a mini-muffin pan. Shape cold dough dough into one-inch balls and place one ball into each cup. Take a pestle, a tart-shaper, or your fingers, dipped in flour, and form dough into shells. Keep that flour on standby-the dough is sticky.
Filling:
In a microwaveable bowl, combine the following:
2 T melted butter
3/4 c packed brown sugar
1 egg
1 t vanilla
1 cup chopped pecans
Carefully spoon filling into tart shells. Do not overfill! Bake 20-25 minutes, until shells are golden brown. Cool them five minutes in the pan, then gently remove them to a cooling rack. Some folks like to doll them up by sprinkling some powdered sugar on them after they’ve cooled. I’ve never seen one last until it’s cool enough to be sprinkled, but I’m sure that’s a good idea in theory. Merry Christmas…
Make the world a better place.