24: Direct bribery

C is for c'mon Santa. 

Day 24.

There is a spectre haunting Europe - the spectre of lumpy coal. 

Today is a day for soul searching and piper paying. A day to be weighed in the scales and found wanting.

We have been sort of good some of the time...more or less. Surely that counts for something?

For everything else there's cookies.

Gingerbread girl

Ana has a patented 'proximity to head' system for ranking toys and various other objects. Cookie cutters command much respect in her hierarchy.  

Cookies on the brain. 

A flour-dusted, sticky-fingered expression for The Gallery hosted by the marvelous Tara Cain.

This week at Chaos HQ

A flying chocolate biscuit eater. 

My favourite picture from recent days.

17: Cookies revisited

Day seventeen and by now you may have noticed that I come from a long, proud line of cookie enthusiasts: buttered sugar runs deep in our veins.

We cooked the cookies in the cookie jar.

If cookie baking was an Olympic event (and it should be), Grandma would be a serial gold medallist. As a girl, I remember how exhausted she was by the sixty-fifth batch, running on endorphins and will-power alone, flanked either side by an international clutch of talented and fiercely competitive cookie-mums. My siblings and I could merely watch in awe, throw energy drinks and towels from the sidelines, and cheer wildly (though this will give you one heckava sore throat because most cookies require at least ten minutes at 175c). Inevitably, Grandma always produced a beautiful deep freezer full of cookies in record time, and we kids applied them to our hoarse throats all winter.

Peppernuts, or pfeffernusse, are compulsory in my family. Happily, they are also delicious. Both Grandma and Great-grandma K excel at peppernutting. Credit for the following wisdom belongs entirely to them, and of course to the long, proud line of peppernutters before them.

Peppernuts are pretty easy. In a mixer, cream 1 cup of softened butter with 1.5 cups of sugar, then beat in three eggs. Then add the zest of one lemon, half a teaspoon white pepper, 1 teaspoon cream of tartar, and 1 teaspoon cardamom (optionally you can also add dashes of the following if you like: lemon juice, cloves, or ginger). Add about 4.5 cups of flour, a bit at a time, just enough until you get a stiff dough. Roll into balls: big and chewy or small and crunchy according to your preference. Bake on greased cookie sheets at about 350f or 180c for about 8 minutes, or until lightly brown. Consume immoderately.

Half baked. 

Sadly I don't think I'm ready for Olympic peppernutting yet: a wise neighbour tells me that my batch tastes like Farley's Rusks.

10: Gingerbread 2, the over-budget sequel

Day 10 in Advent photos, day two in gingerbread terms. As you can see, the infinitely wise Grandma included not one, but a handful of cookie buttons on the calendar.

 Sugar squared. 

The aforementioned baking mission is complete. This house is fully stocked with gingerbread individuals, every one of them a person of (toddler) interest.

Ample opportunity.

Ampelmann, by the way, is someone I met back in the carefree BC days, while hanging out with my lovely sister, Tanta, in Berlin. He is the old East German pedestrian crossing guy, who narrowly survived takeover by the very boring West German walk/don't walk dude, and is still hard at work on the streets of Berlin today. Ampelmann is not only an Ostalgie superhero, but the quintessential Berliner (and no relation to jelly doughnuts). Tanta gifted me a pair of Ampelmann cookie cutters last Christmas. Now with a house full of sugary Ampelmenn, I suspect I will doze off this Christmas Eve with visions of Mitte dancing in my head. 

9: Political gingerbread gone mad

Day 9 in Advent picture terms, and I find myself up against a gingerbread ceiling.

Gingerbread formerly known as man.

There are a gazillion ways to serve up Christmas sugar. Most of them are included in the American cookery bible, 'The Joy of Cooking'. Papa and I received a copy as a wedding present, and it has lived, much-loved and very food-spattered, in our home ever since. The cookbook's status as the yankee kitchen manual of choice obscures what is, to my mind, the greatest joy of the book: its thorough eccentricity. For instance, in my 1997 edition, there is a reduced fat (a joyless 90's fad) recipe not for gingerbread, or gingerbread men, but for 'gingerbread people'. There is a handy illustration of a 'gingerbread person' to drive the baking appropriateness point home in case you were too busy making/consuming cookies to ponder their inherent gender-neutrallity. 

Walk gingerly and carry a big stick. 

There are a hundred other delightful oddities contained in the book. More on this later, since I don't currently have time to dissect it recipe by recipe in the manner of Julie Powell and Julia Child (or The Joy of the Joy of Cooking, a blog on a similarly ambitious and thorough foodie mission as the Julie/a's). Instead I offer you Berlin's answer to the gingerbread person: the Ampelmann cookie cutter (see above). I plan to make a full-fat batch of Ampelvolk today and I expect the whole family, girls and boy alike, will be much more joyfully ample after eating them.