The Art of Baking

It's a time-honored tradition for the women in our family to bake cookies every year and this year, my sister, mom and I were back at it, dancing in the kitchen to Christmas music, and poring over the cookie cutters and the dough and the sprinkles. It was one of the zillion things we tried to pack into a two-day period. Bake cookies, celebrate dad birthday, finish Christmas shopping, go to Grandma's holiday party, bake cinnamon buns, finish wrapping, you know, the winding down of Christmas where you have vowed not to end up at the mall on Christmas eve but what do you know, you're there anyway because that's what happens. We have cookie baking down to a science, even having found the plates and the cellophane wrapping for the packaging really early this season and that never happens, it's always all sold out by the time we get around to buying it. But something peculiar happened to our cookies this year and we swear it wasn't our cookie-baking skills, we believe with our full hearts it was the weather, in which the heavy Florida mugginess and ridiculous heat somehow seeped into the kitchen and penetrated our cookies. Here are our sad chocolate chip cookies.




Our butter cookies, however, seemed to have a banner year, and for that we are proud. But the oatmeal cookies, seemingly perfect when removed from the oven, a perfect combination of chewy and crispy at the same time, turned back into a crumbly oatmeal surprise by morning. It still tasted good, but you had to eat it out of a bowl if you wanted a cookie. Poops sat nearby with his own cookie cutters, having a blast all to himself.