I didn’t bake cookies yesterday because it’s Christmas and I didn’t bake cookies yesterday because it was so cold out that running the oven for a while just seemed like a good idea. No, the reason was more classic, more practical, more time-honored than either of those. I baked cookies yesterday to cheer up my kid. A much-aniticipated playdate turned into a much-postponed playdate and the result was heart-breaking. At least for me.
We were both much cheered by these Swedish Rye Cookies* from 101 Cookbooks. I couldn’t keep Ernie away from them. Last night my dashing husband wondered if I could estimate how many calories were in each cookie. I told him that I couldn’t, but that there weren’t very many in any one cookie for the simple reason that they were so small and thin, but that there were, essentially, butter cookies (with some cream cheese thrown in for good and effective measure) meaning they were composed of flour, butter, and sugar. This morning I noticed the vast majority of the cookies were gone. Over coffee my dashing husband mentioned that “those cookies were really good.” When I offered to make them again he begged off, saying that, perhaps, the cookies were “too good.” He is not usually such a cookie hound. But then, he’s a good New Yorker who loves his rye.
Part of the magic of these cookies is how easy the dough is to work with which translates into how easy it is to roll out which means you can get them extremely thin, if you’re so inclined, which I am. The recipe calls for a much more reasonable and sanity-saving thickness of a 1/4 inch. I was getting into the 1/8 if not even the 1/16 area (is that even possible?). I acknowledge that’s nuts, but I would also assert that a super-thin cookie sprinkled with coarse sugar is a magical thing. And we needed a bit of magic around here yesterday afternoon.
The downside, of course, is you do need to roll them out and cut them, and that’s a pain. The other downside – for me anyway – is the the much postponed playdate showed up about 5 minutes into cookie making. So instead of a mellow, mother-son cookie baking session we ended up with an episode of crazy boys each cutting out a few cookies, running off to construct legos, and me in the kitchen rolling and cutting and baking by myself for over an hour when I really had other things to do. I realize, of course, that this last complaint has nothing much to do with the recipe….
*Please, I beg you not to tell my Norwegian grandfather that I baked anything Swedish. If he asks, tell him I whipped up some Norwegian rye cookies. If that seems like too much of a lie, just call then Scandanavian rye cookies.
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