Mom and I get baked.

Yesterday was Baking Day, spent with Mom. My parents have a wedding photography business, and one of the marketing things they do is take big trays of homemade cookies to all the people who regularly refer them business each year, as a thank-you gift. My Mom, being a genius, realized that most people do this kind of thing around Christmas time, so to be more memorable, she does it at Valentine’s Day.

This is the eighth or ninth year of the Cookie Tray Project, and probably my sixth or seventh year as a helper. (I like to think of cookies as crafting with food.) We’re getting to be a well-oiled machine, which is good, because this is a big bunch of baking.

We first dove into Island Macaroons. These are a mixture of toasted coconut and macadamias, held together with condensed milk and egg white. After baking, you dip just the bottoms in dark chocolate. So very good. . . albeit a little labor-intensive. We made a total of 201 of these.

Next up was a very traditional Scottish Shortbread. Traditional because it’s mixed entirely with your hands. You may think, “Why go to all that mess and bother when I’ve got a Kitchenaid Mixer?” But here’s the thing: I’ve tried versions made both ways, and the hand-mixed is orders of magnitude better. I wish I understood why. I can’t find any references on the web. Does anyone out there have any wisdom on this?

(Incidentally, we use a recipe that was photocopied out of some long-lost magazine. I looked and looked for a similar recipe on the web, but oddly, couldn’t find one. So I’ve opted not to link here, sorry. If you Google “Scottish Shortbread,” you’ll find a ton of variations, and are sure to find one you like.)

The whole shortbread process takes probably 20-30 minutes. You begin with a very scrupulous washing of the hands. Then you take four cold sticks of butter, and cream them with your hands by squeezing them repeatedly until the warmth of your hands softens them. When it’s smooth and creamy, you pour in some superfine sugar, and cream that in with your hands.

When you can’t feel the grains of the sugar anymore, then it’s time to rub in some flour and salt until you have a nice, stiff dough. Then, you pat the whole thing flat over the back of a jelly-roll pan. We scored the surface of the dough, and pricked it with a fork so it would bake evenly. Is there anything nicer in the world than the scent of butter and sugar? (Cookie Total, by the way: 176.)

Let me just interject a little scale here. My mother does heaps of planning for this endeavor, building a series of spreadsheets that outline what amounts of each ingredient she’ll need for each recipe, multiplied by how many batches she plans to make. She then breaks out each basic ingredient — like, butter, flour, sugar, eggs, etc. — and figures out how much she’ll need to buy, subtracting out what quantities she has on hand. She usually makes 12-13 different kinds of cookies for this project, and anywhere from 3-5 batches of each. I should add here that she doesn’t use a computer for all this calculation, she does it all by hand. And she’s always accurate. It amazes me every year.

She also spends an entire day prepping ingredients in advance — chopping nuts and chocolate, toasting coconut, grinding almonds. . . and then pre-measuring them out into bags.

Here are some pictures of the raw ingredients, just because the tonnage of it all makes me chuckle.

Okay, our third recipe was the lovely but somewhat-gruelling Linzer Cookies. (I’m a fan of roll-and-cutout cookies; I just get tired of rolling and cutting after the first couple trays.) The dough contains lots of ground almonds and lemon zest, plus a little cinammon. They smell heavenly while baking.

We rolled out and cut 340 of these babies, half of them with the little heart cut-out you see here. Later on, they’ll have powdered sugar sprinkled over them, and then be sandwiched together with some raspberry jam inside. Cuuuute!

And finally, we made Grammy’s Chocolate Cookies, which were the grand-prize winner in Martha Stewart’s “Cookie of the Week” contest. If you’ve never tried them, they are wonderful – very dark chocolate, and nice and chewy.

The recipe is quite easy, too — the only thing to keep in mind is how much the cookies will spread in the oven. We start with a 3/4″ diameter ball of dough, and end up with a 3″ diameter cookie! Cookie Count here: 241.

And then, a little more scale: I was only involved in one of three baking days! Mom made all these the day before:
Ring-A-Lings (soon to be filled with jam in those centers), heart-shaped sugar cookies, and Biscochitos. (a Mexican wedding cookie flavored with anise). Please send my Mom a little baking mojo this weekend! She’s a force of nature, to be sure.