Cookie season

Now that Thanksgiving is past, it is officially cookie season - I make a list of all the cookie kinds I will make, then go out and buy several hundred dollars worth of flour, butter, sugar, nuts, eggs and chocolate. Then I go into production, nights and weekends - so sometimes I am tired and forget stuff.

I'm pretty superstitious about it - will it be a good year, will I make it through my list (I always do). I started with fruitcake this year, because it keeps a long time, and it came out just right (though I forgot to put a drip pan under the springform pan and had to run the oven self-clean 2 nights in a row - once after the turkey, once after the fruitcake drips). And I made panettone , Italian Christmas bread - because my brother wanted stolen, German Christmas bread, last year - and it tastes good, but is on the crumbly side. Next I made a Swiss cookie, Biberli, little wedges of gingerbread filled with marzipan, and those also look good (and I found out that while Biberli is a cookies in Switzerland, it's little spicy pizzas in Turkish - "biber" means paprika, or peppers). But I made a batch of dough for lebkuchen and left out the sugar. Tossed that batch, made a new batch and after about 3/4 of the dough, I decided it was just too sticky to roll, so I made the last 1/4 as a sheet of lebkuchen in a pan. I got about 80 "normal" lebkuchen, then I am going to have this chewier sheet ... I should have persevered with the rolling.

Now I am going to make the dough for the jam cookies, and I am going to make 2X as much this year, because they always run out. Tomorrow I will bake and stick them together.

It is going to be a good year - as I was rummaging in the closet for a big plastic container for the lebkuchen, I realized that every year, some things come out just right, and some don't - I make some mistakes, but every year, everything is always eaten & enjoyed.