After the cookie crumbles
It’s early March, but here’s a Christmas story anyway. Let me tell you how I baked twenty boxes of holiday cookies, mailed them around the country, and found my identity again as a 2020 graduate. Recipes included, cookie infatuation optional.
Every Christmas, I beat myself up to find the perfect gift for everyone I love. I make so many lists that they always end up cycling back to variations of the same generic things (see: mugs, candles, throw pillows), until eventually, I just give up and go window-shopping instead. This year, in light of the pandemic, there wasn’t even window-shopping to save me.
One night in mid-December, I was overfilling my Amazon cart with gifts I’d never buy and listening to the Charlie Brown Christmas album for the 37th time, when I decided I finally had enough. It hit me that not only does online shopping frustrate me, but that the tune of “Linus and Lucy” calls for a more cheerful activity than rage-ordering fuzzy socks. Cue the holiday cookie box, a gift idea that always pops in my head before Christmas when all else has failed.
In its simplest form, a cookie box is a tin of various, homemade treats. In its actual form, it is a monster project that requires being married to the stand mixer for a week and planning more than Santa does in an entire year. Legend has it that the perfect box contains somewhere between three to seven different types of cookies, always includes a chocolate and a fruit flavor, and must be timed so that it arrives fresh and crisp in the mail. This requires elaborate coordination on the baker’s part, including scheduling each batch of cookies so they are all ready to send at once, and packing them snugly so they don’t break en route.
Despite the obvious right choice, every year I endeavor on this project anyway, dreaming of a mountain of shortbread arriving fresh on my friends’ porches on Christmas morning. I say my vows to the stand mixer, devote myself to the goal, and surprisingly, usually churn out over a hundred cookies. But like almost all of my baking shenanigans, when the time comes to actually mail the packages, I always chicken out. The cookies are always “more cakey than chewy,” or the chocolate chips are “too big and too melty,” or some other absurdly-tiny detail is off. I end up giving them to a few neighbors who I know would never judge me, then buy something generic for everyone else on my shopping list (see: mugs, candles, throw pillows).
But 2020 felt different — messy, imperfect, and full of screw-ups anyways. Plus, I was desperate for gifts more than ever. I decided to take baby steps this time: I would bake just one batch of cookies, and if my kitchen wasn’t in flames by the end, I would consider making more. There were no door-to-door visits this year, so whatever I baked needed to be sent. In a rare feat of motivation, I closed my Amazon tabs, exited my blanket burrito, bought several pounds of butter at the corner mart, and baked honey-roasted peanut thumbprint cookies through the night.
I hadn’t cranked my oven on in months, but as soon as I made my first batch of cookies, I remembered why it was so easy to make a hundred of them. Before I knew it, I had drifted into my usual spell and made five more varieties in one fell swoop, completely abandoning my plan to take baby steps. Maybe I was experiencing a sugar rush from consuming too many said thumbprints, but I felt the familiar, meditative powers of baking take over, bringing me back to childhood. In elementary school, if I ever returned home in tears, I would always find solace in making blueberry pie from my Hello Kitty cookbook. When I went through my first breakup in college, I was comforted by slicing dozens of apples for an upside-down cake. Now, this time around, as I powdered Linzer cookie tops, cut slabs of salted shortbread, and glazed some very cute llamas with royal icing, I felt myself healing for the first time since a chaotic year.
When the flour finally settled, I had several hundred cookies on my hands, only my boyfriend to consume them, and still no gifts ordered off Amazon. This holiday season, I had no choice but to do the unthinkable.
As I carried my labors of love up the snow-covered hills to the post office — twenty boxes for ten families in five states — I realized how much had changed, and not just the fact that I mustered the courage to pack those boxes. Over the past year, I suddenly found myself out of college, unemployed, and without a permanent place to call home. In contrast, last holiday season I was baking in the comfort of my warm house in Ithaca, surrounded by my favorite kitchen tools and with a sense of direction in life. I would write an essay with one hand as I creamed butter with the other, later inviting friends over to lick the beaters and trade finals-season war stories. Last year, I was something — a wide-eyed student, a shoulder to cry on, a hostess of dinner parties, an aspiring journalist. This year, I am no longer any of those things.
But even after most aspects of my life were uprooted, my love for baking was left untouched by everything that came and went. This fact alone has made me reconsider what remains steadfast in the face of change, and as a result, what is most important to me. Before this year, I had enjoyed baking for its comforting process, but was always afraid to share the results. I felt so secure in my path forward and so certain of my place in life, that I didn’t feel the need to step out of my comfort zone and show my friends and family the baking part of me. After all, it is the raw part of me, the imperfect part, the part that spills and burns and second-guesses and is completely unlike the image I hold of myself. But when everything shifted this year and I lost my way in life, these holiday cookies were one of the only things I could call my own. And how humbling it is, to be able to identify with a set of cookies, and cookies only.
If 2020 has pushed me to do anything, it was accepting that some of my cookies will turn out “cakey not chewy” no matter what, and mailing twenty boxes of them with eyes closed and fingers crossed anyways. Ultimately, it took losing my solid footing to come to realize that this part of me — the part that is indeed messy, imperfect, and a little bit underbaked — is worth sharing. After all, when the time came, it was the only thing worth salvaging.
If you’d like to go on your own cookie-meditation journey, I’ve linked the recipes I used below. If you can’t tell, when it comes to matters as serious as holiday cookies, I trust few people more than Alison Roman, Melissa Clark, Claire Saffitz, and Susan Spungen.
Honey-roasted peanut thumbprints
Salted chocolate chunk shortbread cookies
Pistachio thumbprints with jam
