(no subject)

Well I'll be damned! There really are a hundred Eskimo words for 'snow'!

It only gets brighter from here

We made it through the longest night of the year. Go us! It helped that we were coasting on goodwill from bunj and e.'s Annual Christmas Gala, even though it broke up at the very, very adult hour of 9 p.m. I'd eaten too much and drunk too much, so it was hours before my belly would let me sleep, but they were enjoyable ones, basking as I was in the glow from so much warmth. At about one, I decided it was finally time to attempt a lie-down, and just then monshu came up from below.

He was worse than me this year in denying everyone the enjoyment of seeing their presents opened. I only held out on the joint gifts (though I did give into bunj's wheedling to unwrap their homemade limoncello), whereas the GWO took all his unopened back home. So I stuck around for the unveiling. By the time I returned eight hours later, he had already made much use of the new scarf (plenty of smoking breaks on the porch), had a sip of the liqueur (the lush!), and was begging me to open the cookie basket so he could scarf a biscotto.

We must still be giddy from all excess--or perhaps we're feeling that a bit of mortification is in order--because Mr Always Chilly is still gung-ho on our mooted shopping trip downtown, despite a roaring wind outside and some truly terrible wind-chills. We might even see a film if we can resist the urge to return to our snug domestic nest for long enough.

Morgen, Kinder, wird's was geben!

I've never fancied myself much of a baker, but I used to at least pull out the apron and the hand mixer once a year. Two things combined to put a stop to this. One was my brother's marriage to e., which introduced our family to the most serious baker it has every known. I'm talking deadly serious. Take-no-prisoners serious. Block-out-every-weekend-in-Advent-for-baking serious. Alongside her annual extravaganza, other attempts do not suffer by comparison because they do not entre into comparisons; all lesser efforts are trivialised into utter irrelevance.

The other was the runaway success of the Christkindlmarket on Daley Plaza, which ensures a copious supply of precious German confection. I learned to bake things like Lebkuchen precisely because they were unobtainable stateside; the easy availability of commercial brands renders my amateur efforts completely superfluous. Sure, the imports are pricey, but that's just as well, because my natural stinginess is all that holds in check the childlike demands of my id.

There is one case, however, where the Sweet Castle's offering simply can't live up to my expectations: Anislaibchen. The name means "anise loafettes" and they are, as you can imagine, a dream made real for a pastis-slurping, black-licorice-hogging, anise fan like me. Except that the hard little discs at dollars a bag are always too dry and meringuey for my taste. Unless you're dipping them, cookies should be chewier than that, and Anislaibchen are not made for dipping.

My recipe comes from New York food critic Mimi Sheraton's painstakingly authentic (whatever that means) German cookbook. It's simple as hell--only four ingredients--but the prep is just obnoxious enough that I find it too easy to talk myself out of it. The biggest obstacle is that the cookies must dry overnight, and advance planning is not exactly one of my strong suits. But this year, it only took one encouraging word from monshu for me to haul out the mixing bowl.

Ingredients: 4 large eggs, 1¼ cups granulated sugar, 3 cups flour, 1½ tablespoons anise seeds, grease (for the pan)

Tools: mixing bowl, electric mixer, conventional oven, cookie sheet, assorted spoons, spatulas, and measuring cups

Steps:

1. WARM the cookie sheet, grease, and leave to cool again. (If you're also baking something else, go ahead and use the oven, but keep in mind these won't be baked until tomorrow. Otherwise, running warm water over the sheet works well, but just be sure to dry it very thoroughly.)
2. BEAT the eggs with the sugar until very pale and ribbony (about ten minutes).
3. ADD the flour a bit (say a quarter cup or so) at a time, mixing well between additions (i.e. until you hardly see any raw flour). This starts out quickly, but the dough soon grows tough enough to overwhelm all but the most powerful machines; about the end of the second cup, I find I have to switch to hand-mixing. As a result, count on 15-20 minutes for the whole process.
4. CRUSH the anise seeds lightly. I use a mortar and pestle, but I've also resorted to a chopper. I guess you could also run them briefly through a spice grinder, but remember that ground anise is not what you're after. You just want to bruise the seeds enough to release their oils.
5. STIR in the anise seeds, taking care not to dislocate your shoulder in the process.
6. DROP the dough onto the cookie sheet. When I say "drop", I really mean "scrape until it falls" because it will not abandon the utensils without a struggle. I use two teaspoons--real teaspoons from the silverware drawer and not measuring spoons because the elongated shape gives you a fighting chance. I do make some effort to form little balls, but the resulting shapes can most politely be described as "baroque". (Due to the stiffness of the dough, how they look when they fall is pretty much how they look baked. Remember: Craginess is your proof of homemadeness!) They won't spread much, so you hardly need to leave as much as an inch between them. This is another tedious stage and will eat up at least fifteen more minutes or so.
7. LEAVE them out to dry overnight.[*} I don't bother to cover them with anything, but I guess you can if you're anal as long as you allow air to circulate (i.e. merely draping a towel won't work).
8. BAKE the next day in an oven preheated to 300º degrees for about twenty minutes. Sheraton says "until golden", but these are not toll house cookies; they remain quite pale until the end. What you really need to do is start checking the bottoms once they become firm to the touch, because otherwise you'll burn 'em.
9. REMOVE to racks and cool. Store in a tightly-fitting tin, because if you leave them out, they'll dry out into little bricks and then all your extra effort will have been for naught!

If you like these cookies, give kudos to dear departed Mimi and thanks to kmon, without whose shining example I never would've taken the time to write this all up.

[*] This is what makes them emphatically Christmas cookies, at least for Midwesterners. They need the low humidity of continental winters (or Mediterranean summers) to firm up properly. I tried to do them once in July and disaster ensued. Similarly, don't leave them on top of a gas range or too close to a source of heat because they'll melt and lose their softness when baked.