Getting on with the food, cont
Subheading: Christmas cookie plate staples
I haven’t done this in years because it gets harder and harder to hack back and nail down time to do it properly, but I used to turn out decorated plates* of Christmas cookies. It’s a great way to pay back a favour: someone is a hard case indeed who doesn’t at least melt around the edges a little when you show up on the doorstep with a plate of Christmas cookies. But to do it right (say I) you need at least four and preferably five different kinds of cookies. Not all of these you want to be the labour-intensive variety with cookie presses and cutting out and frosting and so on. At the same time you need the simpler ones to have character so they’ll hold their own against the baroque ones. This is one of my favourite simple cookies.
Rum Currant Cookies
Now, before half a dozen of you jostle each other out of the way to be the first to post how much you hate rum . . . allow me to let you in on a little secret: You don’t have to make them. It’s not required! Your RSS feed will still work! Your log in will still recognise you!** Yaay!
I like rum, obviously, and these will furthermore smell of rum, so you don’t have to worry about spoiling the day of another rum-hater who accidentally bites into one. They won’t.*** But if your day is ruined at the prospect of not making the latest recipe to appear in Days in the Life: Cointreau works fine, as does Drambuie.† You could probably pass on soaking the currants in anything, if you’re feeling austere, and have butter currant cookies, although that would rather defeat the point.
¾ c currants. You really do want currants, not raisins. If you’re using raisins . . . well, I won’t tell you you have to chop them, because there are few things you can do in a kitchen†† that make you feel more idiotic than chopping raisins, but raisins are too big
¼ rum or whatever you’re using
2/3 c ordinary white sugar
½ c butter
1 egg
1 tsp REAL vanilla
1 ½ – 2 c flour, depending on how much loose rum remains. These cookies I don’t mess around with: just best quality white flour
Put the currants in the rum and let soak at least 2 hours. I usually put ‘em in when I get up in the morning and make cookies in the late afternoon. You can, if you’re either feeling silly or keep not getting around to making your cookies, just leave them for 2 or 3 days, by which time they’ll have soaked up all the rum (and got dusty, if you didn’t cover the bowl). They’ll also be inclined to disintegrate, so you’ll end up with Rum Currant Streak cookies. They’re still good though. If your currants are really ancient, and are grotty little wizened pebbles, put them and the rum in a little pan and heat it very gently. †††
Cream sugar and butter well. Add egg, beat, then vanilla, and beat again. If you rush this, it’ll curdle, but this doesn’t actually matter a whole lot. Stir in currants and remaining rum. Add flour half a cup at a time for the first three doses, mixing well after each obviously, and then as necessary of the last half cup to make a dough that will drop-cookie: so you want it stiffish. Softish and they’ll spread too much.
Drop little teaspoonfuls on greased or parchment-papered cookie sheets–you want these cookies small and round. 375° about 5-8 minutes, till they’re just beginning to brown at the edges–the bottoms, if you gingerly peel one up, will still be pale. Don’t peel them up, however, let them cool undisturbed. This is one of the reasons I like parchment paper: you can just slide the paper off the cookie sheet onto a rack and load the sheet up with a fresh page of cookies. This’ll make about 4 dozen little cookies, and if you need more than that for 1/5th of your Christmas-cookie plates . . . well, I admire you.
* * *
* Sometimes I even decorated ‘em myself. When you’ve got cookies as your centrepiece and star player(s) the level of artistic merit displayed by their housing may be rudimentary. We’re talking paper plates here, you understand: I was looking to finish the favour loop, not start a new one by lumbering people with empty plates they will have to return with things on them.^ But pretty, decorated paper plates were late coming to England^^. Fortunately the Royal Horticultural Society stepped into the breach. The RHS has a terrific gift shop. No, really.
^ Although this could easily be another of those curious regional American customs that I’m naively unaware are not general.+ Okay, how many of you were raised to believe that you can’t return an empty plate?
+ The list of cultural assumptions an American can’t make in England would fill volumes . . . and has.
^^ With central heating, unmushy peas, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc
** Which is more than can be said for mine, which still regularly accuses me of being an imposter and my password nebbishy and fraudulent.
*** Perhaps you should keep them out of the way of any rum-haters with severe head colds.
† I keep meaning to try using Laphroiag, but have never quite got around to it.
†† Control yourself. I mean that people usually do in kitchens, like cook.
††† This is excellent therapy for any wizened pebbles you find in the back of your cupboard. Short of their being actively mouldy, this will recover to your use almost any dried fruit. Obviously it doesn’t have to be booze, either: my fall back is usually orange juice. But I made some sherry-raisin cookies that were pretty spectacular. It’s also, speaking of superfluous booze, a good way of having a go at using those bottles of port, sherry, Madeira, etc, that tend to accumulate in the back of the drinks cupboard the way wire coathangers do in the closet.^ An average sized bottle will make a lot of cookies, but at least you’re trying.
^ Note that a closet is not necessary. My clothes hang on an open railing in the attic and the wire coathangers are still up there breeding like crazy.
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