HOME BAKED HOLIDAY GIFTS

Home Baked Holiday Gifts

            Our Thanksgiving feasts are but an overstuffed memory, Black Friday and Small Business Saturday are past and now the Holiday season is truly upon us.  The nebulous thoughts of gifts for family and friends suddenly require a new focus.

            I will confess of jumping the season the day before Thanksgiving and doing advance shopping for a grandson at the Damariscotta Book store in order to tap the juvenile book expertise of the staff.  His yearly shifts in interest from knights to pirates to the Revolutionary war have left me inadequately prepared to find the right book for the occasion, but thankfully, the staff there always seem to come up with the appropriate selection.

            Fortunately some of his other tastes, like those for cookies, do not change from year to year.  It seems that all the grandchildren (and children for that matter) look forward to the cookie Holiday offerings from our house. Which means that after Thanksgiving I have to go to work and start baking. And although each year I try for another variety, there are the traditional and beloved varieties that raise the mournful cry of :”but you did not make,,my favorite this year”, if they do not appear in the mailed Christmas boxes. Strangely enough, one of the favorites is my chocolate chip cookies, which really have no special season.  Then there are the festive looking apricot-pecan-buttons, but the loudest protests come if I skip making my mother’s Latvian butter cookies in different seasonal shapes.  They are rich, addictively delicious, fragile, hard to ship, time consuming to make and worth every bit of the effort.

                                    Mother’s Latvian Butter Cookies

            Beat 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature with 1 cup sugar with an electric mixer until light. Beat in 4 egg yolks, one at a time until blended, then stir in 1 tsp. vanilla. Reserve egg whites for another use (see below). Then using a wooden spoon stir in 3 scant cups of flour, sifted together with 2/3 tsp. baking powder until well mixed. Chill dough for at least 2 hours or overnight. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. On a floured board roll out portions of the dough to less than ¼ inch in thickness.  Cut out desired shapes and arrange on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Separate out 2 more egg yolks, reserving the whites with the rest. Beat the egg yolks together with 1 Tblsp. water with a fork and use this glaze to brush the tops of cookies. Bake 12 to 14 min. until the tops are golden. Cool the cookies on the pan for a couple of minutes and finish cooling on a rack. Store in a tightly covered container.

            This leaves you with 6 egg whites, which will keep in the refrigerator for a couple of days and can be used by the thrifty cook as a basis for either an angel food cake or at least two other varieties of delicious cookies: Coconut Macaroons or Meringue Kisses, both absolutely fat free and delicious.  Unlike the butter cookies, these are easy to make and while Meringues are gluten free, the Macaroons can easily be made gluten free.

                                    Meringue Kisses

            Preheat oven to 250 degrees and prepare baking pans by spreading them with brown paper (a cut open grocery bag works fine). Do NOT grease the paper. Turn 3 room temperature egg whites in a 2 quart mixing bowl and beat until stiff peaks with curved tips appear. Beat in 1 cup of sugar in 6 portions, beating until each is blended. Now beat in 2 tsp. lemon juice and continue beating until peaks are stiff.  Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls on the prepared pans about 1 inch apart. Bake 25 to 30 min. until pale cream color. Turn off the oven and leave oven door open with the pans inside for another 15-20 minutes. Remove from paper with spatula and cool on a wire rack.

                                    Coconut Macaroons

            Stir together in a large bowl 2 ¼ cups shredded sweetened coconut, 3 heaping Tblsp. flour (use rice flour for gluten free), ½ tsp. salt, 2/3 cup sugar.  Thoroughly mix with 3 slightly beaten egg whites and ½ tsp almond extract.  Drop teaspoonfuls on parchment lined cookie pans and bake at 325 degrees for about 20 minutes until edges of cookies turn light brown.  Cool on a wire rack and store in an airtight container. These cookies are best when fresh with their soft chewy texture.

            Now all I need is a rainy (or snowy) week to get my Holiday Gift baking accomplished.

(I. Winicov Harrington lives in Waldoboro and is the author of “How to Eat Healthy and Well for Less than $5.00 a Day: the Smart-Frugal Food Plan”; website: www.winicov-harrington.com)