Cookie Bake

The best way that I can think to give your sense of smell a big pick up is to bake cookies. Baking is still a very big tradition in Germany. The further south you go, the more they bake.

I used to visit a friend’s family in Frankland (middle-south) on weekends. My friend’s mother would get up early Sunday morning and bake up to three cakes, which the family ate for breakfast (I kid you not) after everyone returned from mass. These were not mix-and-bake cakes; they were starting-from-scratch cheesecake, marble loaf, plum torte, and black forest cake.

The most wonderful and creative baking though is done when mothers, grandmothers, colleagues, friends, neighbours, and children bake up cookies for Advent. These are masterpieces of variety and they are place prettily in tin boxes. Every time you sit down to tea during Advent there is usually a plate with a wide assortment of cookies in the centre of the table.
As all of you know, I am a miserable baker, though I am an enthusiastic cook. Come November, my bad conscience starts to feel the twinges of inadequacy, stupidness, and even-a-child-can-do-this. Nearly everyone I know, old and young, male or female, have started bringing out their Christmas cookie cutters, their grandmothers’ favourite recipes, and traipsing off to the spices stall at to the Saturday market to buy new spices.

Having lived here for ions, I developed two tactics for dealing with my baking inadequacies during this very festive baking season. I either buy expensive English shortbread cookies to serve to friends when they come over and pretend that traditionally my family did the same when I was a child. (A complete lie. Our paternal grandmother made her own Christmas fruit pudding and miniature mincemeat pies and our maternal grandmother made up a marvelous assortment of Christmas cookies). The second tactic is to get my children invited to my friend, C.’s, place and let them do the baking.

The children come home with tins and tins of fantastic cookies and our friend is left a kitchen whose every surface is covered in flour and dirty dishes. Yet, I never get the feeling of being the winner because the children have also left behind the memories of baking together in a warm and cheery kitchen with every single millimetre filled with wonderful smells.