Since the first winter we were here, I've been going to an annual Cookie Party that Phyllis Fredendall hosts. Everyone brings a dozen cookies for each of the other party-attendees.
And so this morning I got up and started baking, using materials and equipment that I rarely use any other day of the year. I made 8 dozen of the cookies I have been making regularly for quite some time, Ginger Moons from the China Moon cook book. And then I tried to make an equivalent amount of a new recipe.
If you ever get tempted to make this recipe, know that the recipe is not accurate: you need not simply to "combine" the egg whites and vanilla, you need to *beat* the egg whites and vanilla into stiff peaks before folding them into the cocoa, sugar, and walnuts. If you do not beat the egg whites, the dough isn't dough, it's runny, and it is impossible to get the cookies off their baking sheets, whether the sheets are covered with wax paper, wax paper and Crisco, or Crisco alone. You can't get them off with a dough scraper. You can't get them off with a knife. You can't get them off with running-behind words of nasty despair and Oprah-deprecation.
If you do beat the egg whites (if you have enough ingredients to make another batch starting 15 minutes before you are supposed to be at the party because you just lost an hour trying to excavate cookies from wax paper), then the cookies slide cheerily off the Criscoed baking sheets.
The cookies are good -- whether in their crumbed or whole state. (I did not take pictures of the chocolate cookies, only the ginger cookies. The ginger cookies are damn tasty, if you like ginger.)
The Cookie Party is always easy to slide into. We laugh, a lot, especially when Harriet describes what it took her to bake her cookies. (This year, there's a lost snake and piss-smelling baking chocolate involved.) Because I arrived late this year, I missed partaking in a major decision, which is that the cookie party will continue next year -- just without the cookies.
...
There are two aspects to the cookie party that, even though I've been going since 1992, remain un-home-like to me.
First, there is a tension in the production of cookies. I have never been a baker of sweets. Sometimes, irregularly, I bake bread or pies, but never cookies. The weird business with cookies is the ordered repetition. In an hour one can make, if one has an electric beater, 8 dozen rolled and cut cookies with chocolate-chips, cut in half, as eyes. (This does not include the 4 or 5 sequential 15-minute-each oven bakings for the trays of dough.) For efficent dough use, one tries to cut as many cookies as possible out each sheet of the rolled dough. For efficient baking, the raw cookies ought to be arranged evenly and linearly on the cookie sheets. But in order to look like the hand-produced little objects that they are, the cookies have to have a little unevenness to them. The halves of chocolate chips help here: some of the cookies end up looking heavy-lidded, while others look a little stunned. The dough also puffs a little unevenly, so that some of the cookies have full cheeks. As I am moving just-baked cookies onto the cooling rack, especially since the Cookie Party is always in only an hour or two, I have to avoid getting caught in their personalities. Besides, they are only to be eaten. But they are uneven little faces, each of the 8 dozen of them.
Second, there is the business of Cookie Parties. I grew up on the coasts, and I never heard of cookie parties -- but I had been in Houghton for only 4 months before I was invited to one. Family Reunions are also a big deal here -- a Midwest business? The Cookie Party clearly has a very functional purpose: because it is easiest to focus on just one or two kinds of cookies yourself, it is a treat then to trade them for lots of other kinds of cookies (which one then gives to the neighbors as a sign of Christmas neighborliness). But all of this means that baking cookies -- baking massive amounts of cookies, using massive amounts of sugar, butter, chocolate, eggs, and time -- is an expected part of Christmas, so that someone some time in a womanly and aproned past was thinking about how to achieve a wide assortment as efficiently as possible and came up with the idea of Cookie Parties.
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