Sugar cookies sweeter with daughter’s help
As a mother, I’m often asked if I bake with my daughter. I have to laugh. So presumptive! I do bake (sometimes) and I do have a daughter (always). But the innocent and precious assumption that she stands right at my hip, with smudges of flour on her cheeks, while I mix and roll and bake and pipe, just could not be further from the truth.
My 4-year-old daughter is glitter, convinced to play the role of a human. Magic incarnate. But baking is not magic, and flour is not glitter, and EmberClaire would rather parade through the kitchen with fairy wings and a toy lasso than a whisk. Before her arrival, I dreamed of sharing my favorite space with her, of wrapping the apron strings twice around her tiny waist, of explaining the science of cookies and cakes in tiny-person language. She has different ideas. She’s interested in the eating part, but that’s about it.
But then the pandemic hit. Last spring’s global shutdown found us suddenly at home together and largely alone while her dad hunkered down in a makeshift office in the basement. Overnight, I had no work and she had no pre-school, and we struggled to find our common ground as the days stretched out in front of us. She wanted to do a lot of playing with makeup and jumping off the couch, and I — almost 9 months pregnant — wanted to do a lot of nothing.
By Day 25, the truth was hard to ignore: The
pandemic was, for the foreseeable future, synonymous with the “new normal” and girlfriend and I needed to get on board – fast. It seemed the only pastime we’d yet to tire of was our daily walks. So every afternoon we’d dutifully grab our sunnies and stretch our legs and wander around outside, chatting about the squirrels and the birds and the things sprouting green. She’d practice identifying their cheerful faces from afar.
“Crocus, mama!” “Dandelions!” “DAFFODILS!” We’d high-five and cheer. It was our favorite part of every day.
On a particularly rainy and gray one, however, she chirped after lunch: “Maybe today we skip our walk and we make cookies instead, mama?”
I looked at her suspiciously. A tandem cooking project, the offer of help in the kitchen, in our house these are things that imply a big mess, a salty grownup and an apprentice who bails on the job a mere four minutes in. And yet. She was willing to try her hand.
Also, her mom was 8 months pregnant. In other words, I never stood a chance.
I drew a hard line in the sand — no chocolate chips. “Hyper” is a polite word for the way that she behaves when she’s had some. Ditto anything with sprinkles or frosting; I was hungry but not a sadist. So what was left?
Lucky were we to have a crate of fresh oranges sitting on the table, and luckier still to have a grandpa – my husband’s dad – in Florida to ship them to us each year. Their sweetness and sparkle is always appreciated, but during a pandemic? They were worth their weight in gold.
Remembering her joy over a Creamsicle – her first – the previous summer, I did my best to dispatch the case of Florida navels into an intensely vanilla sugar cookie, punched up with enough orange to make it sparkle.
We condensed an entire crate of oranges down to just a few skimpy cups of juice and zest. We found vanilla beans and the good extract. We weighed and we poured and we scooped. And for the first time, there were no complaints about how the mixer was too noisy, no laments that I wouldn’t let her eat spoonfuls of sugar, no eeeeking when some flour sifted down onto her princess costume.
We were cooking. Just cooking. No drama, no big deal. And when the cookies were done, perfectly chewycrisp and absolutely pulsing with vanilla and citrus, she cooed over their delicate butteryellow hue. “Oooh, mama. Like the daffodils!”
We had enough of that juicy, concentrated orange magic to make several batches of cookies, so we froze portions and continued to make them, every so often, throughout the year. The last bit made a batch this week, just as citrus season is coming to an end, just as – dare we hope – the pandemic begins to feel as though it, too, is in slow descent.
These cookies will always bring me back to the darkness, fear and loss of the pandemic. But they’ll also bring me back to long walks, to daffodils, to the end of citrus season, to the end of her being so little. A bittersweetness, like the oranges themselves.