Baking is hell

“4 by 6, 4 by 6!” chirped my mother. Don’t let the verb fool you; her commands (for that is what they are) are obeyed more hastily than if they came from a grizzled drill sergeant. In this instance, she is redirecting a wayward private who had thought to go with an unapproved cookie dough layout. “We must maximize the number of cookies produced on each sheet! And remember, we want pretty cookies!” Our mission: to bake well over a thousand cookies in just a few short hours. Such is life in the holiday cookie brigade, and I should know. I’ve served more tours of duty in the HCB than any of the other officers.
It wasn’t always like this. In the beginning, it was just my mom and I, baking a few batches of holiday cookies for the three of us (Dad can’t even put the dishes back in the right cabinets, so he was granted an exemption from our baking campaign). We had fun, ate the baked goods (always my favorite part), and had a very relaxing time of it. Then my Auntie Reb moved back to town with her Air Force husband and two young children, and our baking duo became a quintet. We gladly welcomed the additions. It was a little busier, but I had fun entertaining my young cousins with cookie dough shapes and showing them how to eat piping directly out of the tube. It wasn’t until the Crafty Friends got involved that CB-Day turned into the massive effort on multiple fronts that it is today.
The Crafty Friends: an elite force of my mother and my aunt’s friends dedicated to sewing and, one day a year, baking. Unfortunately, the irony of this moniker is lost to any outside of the circle: they were (years of intensive tutoring by my mother have brought them almost up to spec) most decidedly uncrafty friends. In fact, in keeping with the day’s more sensitive times, mother used to refer to them as “craft challenged”, a nomenclature they laughingly accepted since it was so very apt. I still chuckle when I think about Auntie Linda sewing the handles across the bag instead of on the sides and how Auntie Mo added pieces from someone else’s Christmas tree skirt to her own. And none of us, our next-door neighbor included, will ever forget the home invasion.
Considering the participants, this campaign might sound like an exercise in chaos (and it can be, especially when considering the “mimosa factor”). However, the general, I mean mom, has a plan of attack that she sticks to with a ferocity a Jack Russell terrier would be proud of. Each November, we begin by deciding which cookies we will make. This is a more difficult task than it seems, because everyone has their own personal favorite that simply MUST be made. That means we start with about ten different recipes. Then mom and I look at new recipes we would like to add to our repertoire. This puts us at about eighty different recipes. Then take a heavy dose of reality and cut the list of new recruits down to about twelve. Then we look at last year’s recipe list to determine which cookies made the cut and which ones scrubbed out. Eventually, we end up with a list of about twenty-five different kinds of cookies, all of which will be baked in one day.
That is not to say that all of the cookies are “made” on CB-Day. To attempt that would be impossible, so we have instead adopted the tactics of the current administration: pre-emptive strikes. The day before CB-Day, mom (aided by me, her loyal lieutenant) prepares all of the cookie dough that must be refrigerated before it can be dropped. By 11:00 p.m. we are as ready as we can be for the carnage to come.
As a senior officer, I report bright and early the next morning. I start baking the dough from the night before, while she mixes more batches. The rest of the forces drift in eventually, bringing supplies and fresh meat, I mean their children. The veterans are put to work as soon as they arrive; the maggots go through a brief boot camp (there are almost never any freak-outs): “4 by 6 goes on the sheet/Pretty cookies can’t be beat. Sound off.”
The Kitchen-Aid mixer roars like a jet engine as cup after cup of flour and sugar pour into its stainless steel maw. Spoons clash as the cookie droppers dip again and again into the waiting bowls of dough, making sure to bring out only enough dough to form one-inch balls. The light glints off the knives of the choppers, their fingers stained red by the blood of countless cherries. Wave after wave of cookies steam out of the oven, to beach upon the broad plain of the pool table. Combat has been met in earnest as we fight to keep the pace; cookies drop on the sheets, the sheets go in the oven, more cookies drop on more sheets, sheets come out of the oven, cookies come off the sheets. We continue to make advances on the cookie front, until about noon, when we break for lunch. The truce doesn’t last long, however, and we take up our positions again in the seemingly endless cycle of drop/bake/decorate.
And of all of the thousands of cookies littering the dining room like the bodies of the fallen, there is only one kind I must eat, the one that I have been waiting for since this time last year. It is my personal badge of honor, the accolade that keeps me enlisted: cherry cookies. I am not the only one held in their thrall; there is a reason other than sheer stubborn fecundity that we make eight batches of this one recipe. They are a study in the things I love: cookies, cherries, frosting. That’s my holy trinity, my guiding light, the reason I enter the trenches year after year.