Doing the holiday baking

We always do a cookie exchange among the family at Christmas  time.  My grandmother’s typewritten cookie instructions and crowd the table with book recipes for rugelach, traditional bourbon balls alongside shortbreads introduced a year ago.  I have to lay in lots of ingredients that make nutritionists blanch: butter, whole milk, eggs, sugars (although food advice warning against these staples,  is changing).

 

With jet lag and prep for diagnostic tests preventing any sleep, I’ve been up early each morning to mix, knead, refrigerate and roll.  A year of watching Masterchef and pushing myself into new styles and yielded a better sense of how to combine ingredients (and when to stop combining).  I got abundant high-quality goods this year.  Especially nice were some experiments with miniature loaves of ginger-, cranberry-, and pumpkin bread.

With the icing, it all comes together.

 

I’m still not making the gtraditional UK Christmas Cake. ‘far better to leave that to my w.wezen, who knows.