SPRINKLED WITH LOVE
Tips on rolling and decorating your holiday cookies
Itstartedw ith a need for a holiday dessert. Something I could do
the day before the dinner party for eight that I was hoping to have between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
My mother-in-law was visiting during the planning stage of this dinner. When I asked her thoughts ona festive end of the meal, she suggested rollout cookies.
“Oh, I can’t do those,” I said. “The rolling out business makes me crazy. I can never keep the dough from sticking to the rolling pin.”
“Put the dough between two sheets of floured wax paper,” she said. “It’s easy that way.”
W hat an e piphany. I’ll admit that even with the wax paper, it took me several rounds of practice before I got the technique down, b ut once over that hur- dle, I rolled wild and free.
I t’s b ecome a habit now, this connection in my mind between celebrations and rollout cookies. When friends say they’re having a Super Bowl party, I start thinking
about team colors on star shapes. A group of my hubby’s college friends plan a reunion in Austin, and I picture cacti bristling with emerald-green jimmies, cowboy hats in white or blue-black sanding sugar, and red or green jalapeños with brightly colored icing.
Now that I have grandchildren, I make regular trips to the post office with tins for Halloween, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Easter. Everyone thinks I make these cookies out of love and a generous spirit.
But the truth is that I’m a sprinkles junkie – so much so that the house we built here has a special closet just for sprinkles and cookie cutters. Although I’ve grudgingly allocated some space to spices, it’s the sanding sugars, jimmies, sugar pearls, edible glitters and nonpareils of all sizes and colors that make my heart swell and my fingers itch to decorate.
And then there are the dra-
gées. The ne plus ultra of the sprinkles world, they are those little silver and gold balls that look like BB’s or rifle shot. I sprinkle them liberally or sparingly, as the mood strikes me, in gold or silver and in sizes from the diminutive 2 mm pindots to the hefty 7 mm orbs. They’re the bubbles on my Champagne glasses, the balls on my Christmas trees, the eyes on my black cats. They make my stars shine and my moons glow.
I wasn’t a baker as a child, but my San Antonio grandmother was known for her brownies and apricot tarts. I remember standing at her side, apron-clad, learning to stir the pecans into the flourand-cocoa mixture before we blended the dry ingredients with the wet, and using a demitasse spoon to deliver the right size dab of stewed apricots to the tart rounds.
Now the magic has come full circle as my own grandchildren jump at the chance to work the rolling pin, to press the cookie shapes into the dough and to cover the finished cookies with icing and sprinkles. We don’t worry about perfection — with two or three kinds of decorating sugar as well as dragées on a single cookie, each one looks as if it’s having a party.
As in life, I tell them that the beauty comes from a mix of colors and shapes, all sparkling and smiling together.