Tag Archives: cookies

Last images of Christmas…

Christmas, church, Theophany, , , ,

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Tonight is the eve of Theophany/Epiphany, the beginning of the feast. According to some traditions, the wise men will arrive tomorrow, so this will be the last night I have my star in the upstairs window. I wanted to keep it up at least until this day — last year’s burnt out before, I think, and the picture is of the new one that isn’t as clear a signal, but at least it lets the neighbors know that we keep Chrisstar 2014tmas here.

I baked cookies this year, but when the 25th dawned I’d only made five kinds, instead of my usual dozen or so. After Kate arrived on the Second Day of Christmas I made another three batches, and now those are mostly eaten or given away, too. This is the second collection. Clockwise from the left, Chocolate Black Pepper, Peanut Brickle Bars, Apricot Macaroons, Ginger Spice, Walnut Coffee Cookies, and above them, Bizcochitos. The Peanut Brickle Bars were a completely new kind, and everyone loved them, so I made a second batch to replenish the stores.

cookies 2014 2nd batch

We ate cookies and opened presents in various groupings over the course of a week. During one of the opening sessions Liam cozied up the couch next to me by piling u bears GJ 14p my Christmas bears there; then he settled in. We got to see eight of the twelve grandchildren this Christmas, which was one the best parts.

Soldier and Joy made several beautiful wood-burned signs for gifts; this one below Mr. Glad and I received and put up on the wall right away. Everyone who saw it could join in the feeling it conveyed, and admire the handiwork.

 

Christmas Joy 14

tree 14 crp

Our Christmas tree this year was such a beautiful tapered shape, thick with branches whose fat needles didn’t dry out. Unfortunately its trunk did not taper, but stayed thick to the top, which made it weigh a ton, and I pulled muscles and sinews in various places just helping Mr. Glad get the tree in and up. We are procrastinating the undoing of that project. I know, it looks like many other Christmas trees, and you can’t see all around it to know what I’m talking about, but I want its picture here anyway. It has so many branches down low, I have had to crawl under every night to water it, and that makes me love it even more.

Pippin often gives me a bird for the tree. This year’s cloisonne edition looks like it should be the king of all, so royally dressed, articulated and brilliant.

cloisonne 14 xmas

At church soicon evergreen decor 14me icons had been decorated with soft conifer branches, making a sort of tent over the image. And my city still had its decorations up last night; the fire department hangs these lights on the coast redwood trees that line the main boulevard. We’ve enjoyed them for 20 years or more, but this is the first year I’ve managed to stop and take their picture.P1120148

Epiphany in the west focuses on the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child, and I think everywhere it is about Light, too. Quoting from this website, “From ancient times this Feast was called the Day of Illumination and the Feast of Lights, since God is Light and has appeared to illumine ‘those who sat in darkness,’ and ‘in the region of the shadow of death’ (Mt.4:16), and to save the fallen race of mankind by grace.”

In the Orthodox Church we commemorate the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan by John the Baptist, when not only was Christ shown to be the Light of the World and the Son of God, but the Holy Trinity was revealed, as our hymn for the feast reminds us with rejoicing:

When You, O Lord were baptized in the Jordan
The worship of the Trinity was made manifest
For the voice of the Father bore witness to You
And called You His beloved Son.
And the Spirit, in the form of a dove,
Confirmed the truthfulness of His word.
O Christ, our God, You have revealed Yourself
And have enlightened the world, glory to You!

wintertime loves

books, family, nature, , , , , , , ,

We in the arid parts of the West have been exulting in rain the last week or so. It’s so comforting and even glorious to wake in the night and hear the rain still coming down. Then to wake in the morning and see it is still falling. We had puddles in the back yard! Thank you, Lord!

Mr. Glad and I do live in northern California, but daughter Pippin lives even farther north in the state, and we drove there early this week for a short visit. Often February is a very snowy month at her place, but this year they’ve had more dry weather and rain than snow, and even the rain stopped while we were there, so we could get outdoors easily for work and recreation.

One day we made a family project out of pruning old apple trees that Pippin and The Professor are trying to revive from years of neglect. I floated back and forth between lopping branches and swinging the kids.

I would get Scout and Ivy going and then run over
to take a picture of the adults on ladders.

Another day we took a short trip to Castle Crags State Park and walked a trail alongside the Sacramento River. Considering the dryness of this year, I was amazed at the thick moss and ferns.

 A pale green, almost white lichen grew on rocks and tree stumps.

yew trees on the riverbank

Everything was wet from the recent rains, and many times our feet slipped on the invisible mosses — or was it algae? — growing on wooden bridges or river rocks.Ivy practiced throwing pebbles into the river, and once she got the hang of it she did not want to do anything else. The supply of rocks was endless.We went to the confluence of Castle Creek (in the foreground below) and the Sacramento River, from which you can get great views of the jagged rocks above, called the Castle Crags. They are high enough that the recent precipitation there was in the form of snow, and some was still unmelted and visible.


My dear husband showed me this large and artsy rock, which you can also see in the photo at the very top of this post, in its original setting. I wanted to take it home. It was a little too heavy for me to carry, so The Professor hauled it back to the car. It came with us on our journey home and is now living by our house. Mr. Glad classified it as a confluitic rock. 🙂

Winter days are short enough that at the end of our busy days there was plenty of time for cozy gatherings in the kitchen or by the wood stove. I read many books to the children. Scout’s current favorite, which I read about on a blog before Christmas and gave to him, is Bumblebee at Apple Tree Lane, and we read it several times.

Ivy likes The Little Fur Family best right now. We danced to the children’s favorite recordings, and also listened to bird calls on the Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs CD. After ten minutes of loons and other waterfowl, Ivy must have deduced that those bird songs were some kind of dance music, too, and she started twisting and prancing around.

Hot soup is what you need on a winter’s night, so Pippin and I learned how to make French Onion Soup, using the recipe in The New Best Recipe: All-New Edition by Cook’s Illustrated Magazine. The secret that the Cook’s testers learned is that red onions give the best flavor. Our result was sooo good.

And cookies! Pippin had some dough left in the freezer from her Christmas Peppernuts, the recipe that I concocted a long time ago but haven’t made for years. We like our nuts to be nut-sized, so we always cut the frozen dough into little cubes and bake them long enough that they come out crispy. Next Christmas I’ll give the recipe.But for now, since I do love cookies, they make a good ending to my story of a wintry family visit that was warm and sweet.

peppernuts 13-14

Yet farther on my road today.

books, family, Nativity, poetry, , , ,
My lights and bows are still up – and the tree.

The bright season of the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord is only in its sixth day, but already we need to make room in our minds for thoughts of transition, closing out one calendar year and opening a new one.

Before I go there, I need to be done with all the Christmas cookies, at least on this blog. Last night we Glads were off to another party, and I took the tins out of the freezer again and loaded up a plate to take along, but that still didn’t use them all up.

I made ten different kinds of cookies this year, including five new ones. Next year I may share some of those recipes, but for now, on to other things!

Like reporting on last week’s doings: We had three different groupings of family celebrations in two different locations. Sunday before Christmas we went to church with Pippin and family; this is Ivy in the foyer. I took the photo from behind so I could show her pigtails.

 

And next to a lamp made of popsicle sticks, a bunch of uncles and nephews playing a game, something they always make time for when getting together after a few months.

 

 

One of the trees that had been cut on federal land in Trinity County had been decorated with antique spice tins. I thought you would like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back at our place, Liam got a lesson in Christmas tree appreciation and gentleness. He was a good student.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I found this pretty piano ornament at Pottery Barn when they were having a special deal, and I gave one to each of several pretty pianists in the family.

Some of my own favorite presents were these books I’ll be reading in the new year, given by four different people who scanned my Amazon list and surprised me with titles I had wished for and forgotten. Kind people.

I feel the Old Year rushing away, and the New coming fast at me, never mind that I’m not “ready.” Sickness right before Christmas pushed some duties ahead to After Christmas, and what might have been a purely R&R&R (the last R for Rejoicing) Sixth Day of Christmas will be interrupted by the Computer Guy coming to help with our computer, a machine so rude as to take our attention off the holiness of the days we are in.

As I am in a liturgical church, the service yesterday gloriously confirmed the present-ness of the holy day that is so cosmologically momentous as to need at least twelve days to properly keep it. The carol-singing we did last night also kept me planted firmly in the Feast, so that for an hour or two I didn’t have to think about the onrushing year of 2014.

Some lines of poetry from Christina Rossetti helped me when I took a few minutes to think. The last lines were the most applicable to my heart’s comfortable place, reiterating what I come back to again and again, the knowledge that whatever comes, today or in the coming year God means it for our salvation.

New Year met me somewhat sad:
Old Year leaves me tired,
Stripped of favourite things I had
Baulked of much desired:
Yet farther on my road to-day
God willing, farther on my way.

New Year coming on apace
What have you to give me?
Bring you scathe, or bring you grace,
Face me with an honest face;
You shall not deceive me:
Be it good or ill, be it what you will,
It needs shall help me on my road,
My rugged way to heaven, please God.

Whether or not you are the type of person who needs a lot of down time to process the meaning of the days of Christmas and the New Year, I pray you will find help to progress on your road to heaven. May God strengthen us all!

A cookie might be a little seedy bun cake.

Christmas, family, food and cooking, history, , , ,

By the time I came into my husband’s family, Seedy Buns were only a memory in the minds of the older generations. My father-in-law said they were cookies featuring caraway seeds and a treat eaten at Christmas, but perhaps he got them mixed up with Seedy Biscuits? Because a bun is bread, we all know that, whereas a biscuit can be a cookie if it is in the British Isles. But what if you take a bun and sweeten and shorten it up? Might it be like a little cake?

I never thought of a cookie as being a little cake until I read The Little Book to my children very long ago. “A cookie is a little cake,” it says right there. I know that type of cookie, and I don’t really care for them. I like mine chewy or crispy, but not cake-y.

In my joyful Christmas cookie project, which is my art at this time of year, I had the idea to make a modern Seedy Bun that would hearken back to the ancestors who brought their Cornish traditions to California.

Once a cousin had taken a box of sugar cookie mix and thrown in a can of caraway seeds to create a simple reenactment, and I scoured the Internet to see what else might be out there as inspiration.

 

 

A fascinating collection of recipes from newspapers dating 1891 to 1981 gave a hint as to the possibilities, and included two poems mentioning a grandma or an aunt making caraway cookies. Here’s one of the recipes that even claims to make a crisp cookie:

It was published in Lincoln, Nebraska in 1919, and I think is interesting for its use of the word “butterine,” which I’d never seen before.

Early American cooks also used seeds liberally in their cookies, often coriander or caraway, and I liked the looks of a glazed cookie based on one from the first American cookbook published in 1796.

Cooks are like folk-singers, changing and adapting their material freely, and it’s not as though I am looking for The Original Seedy Bun recipe to cook myself, but it would be nice to know what those cookies were like, that my husband’s grandma made.

In the meantime I decided to try this recipe for lemony cookies, calling for ground caraway seeds which I didn’t have. I tried grinding some in the blender, but they only burned from the heat, so I used whole seeds.

Some of the baked cookies were a little skimpy on seeds, like the one I picture below. I’ll have to see how everyone receives them before I decide whether to make these the same way another time. If I make a different Seedy Bun, I might bake these again as well, without the caraway, because I agree with their creator about their appealing “depth and intensity” from the lemon juice and zest.


After my Seedy Lemon Biscuits were put away in the freezer, I heard from an older grandchild of my husband’s grandmother who, I was so happy to hear, had made a collection of Grandma’s recipes, and the first cookie in the collection was indeed called Seedy Buns.

Grandma’s Recipes

COOKIES:

Seedie Buns – 5 doz. These are similar to sugar cookies.

Sift and set aside: 3 C flour, 1 t baking powder, 1/4 tsp t salt

Cream in bowl: 1 1/4 C butter

Beat in until fluffy: 1 1/4 C sugar

Add: 3 eggs one at a time, beat well after each.

Blend in: 1 t grated orange peel, 1 t vanilla, 2 T caraway seeds

Chill several hours.

To form cookies take about 1 T dough and roll into ball.

Place on lightly greased baking sheet

Flatten to 1/4″ with bottom of a glass dipped in sugar.

Bake at 375 degrees for 8-10 min., or until lightly browned.

If any of my readers have favorite seedy cookie recipes, I’d love to hear about them. It’s not too early to start brainstorming for next year!