An exotic holiday cookie for simple holiday joy.
The winds whipped our house for 5 days straight, knocking down power lines all over town. Knotting hair, cancelling plans, toppling trees, crushing spirits and frankly really ruining the holiday vibe.
Kind of.
There’s something special about the inconvenience of not having power, or water, or cell service. It forces one to be STILL. To stop doing. To turn in, and really re-evaluate resources and how you spend them.
Each little light on the battery pack becomes gold. Each drop of water. Each match, moment and meal – a measurement in how to hold on to what you have, so as not to waste it. This is a theme of this season – conserving resources and spending them wisely – but I didn’t expect such a blatant example or practice to land in my lap the week that I had planned to doallthethings…finish gift shopping, tidy up communications until the end of the year, pack us for a trip to see grandparents, attend all the holiday functions AND bake all the cookies.
As the power company continued to push out the date that I could turn on the oven and begin, I had to get real about what was possible. What was reasonable. Instead of the week that I’d blocked off in January to piddle and play in the kitchen, I’d have one day. Should I honestly spend it baking instead of running, riding, packing, cleaning, resting? YES.
And so, these little Citrus-Cardamom Sugared Sablé Cookies are what I made us.
Good question. Yes, maybe. And ABSOLUTELY NOT.
On the yes side, would those store-bought cookies have been completely adequate for the friends I wanted to gift them to, especially during this wild week? Absolutely. The gesture would not have gone unnoticed.
But storebought cookies don’t get me excited. A cookie isn’t just a cookie, for me.
When I was a little girl, my mother used to bring our her stand mixer and leave it on the counter from what feels like Thanksgiving through the New Year. There was always something magical spinning inside, and the end product was a bounty of treats that we marched to friends and neighbors as the holiday progressed, and of course the abundant platter that was waiting for us (first picked by Santa, of course) on Christmas morning. There were little jam filled buttons, puffy powdered sugar snowballs, tender pumpkin cookies with this ridiculously addictive frosting, chocolate covered cherries, intricately designed gingerbread. It was magic.
And then, one year, she learned she had a gluten-intolerance and the tradition came to a halt. I was in my early teens, and was determined to keep the treat factory going. So, I asked to be delivered to the bulk section of our local grocery store to find flours that could stand in for the vilanous wheat. I came back with soy, coconut and some other ghastly options. Needless to say that my uninformed efforts to simply substitute the beautiful gluten in her cookies didn’t work. It was the saddest day.
But I didn’t give up. My interest in how to make a cookie that could suit my mother’s interests never stopped intriguing me. And, some 20 years later my hobby baking was qualified with a Grand Diplome from Le Cordon Bleu; I became a pastry chef.
Much of what I bake now doesn’t contain gluten. But that ended up not being the point. The specialness, was what I was really after. The care and attention required to make something, and make it well is a practice that I find grounds me in a swirling world. To show up and align with the alchemy of cooking sufficiently to bake the perfect cookie is a tool I use to check in, calm my system, and say hello to the forces larger than myself. To be at their mercy, and align with them is what I love about cooking – but baking specifically.
And then, to spread the magic far and wide feels like the kind of gift that just isn’t that common these days. Even when the cookies don’t turn out as planned. There are far too few hand-tied bows, morsels decorated by fingers and love notes delivered personally these days. The cookie boxes and little collections of treats I long to make all year are all of those things. The gift that I wish to receive.
The gift that I sometimes have to give myself.
“Should I have spent that time baking the cookies?”
“Should I be eating cookies at all?”
These are just two questions that “might” have entered into my consciousness these past days, IF I didn’t have a practice called yukti in play. Yukti is the ability to recognize what works best for you, right now, based on lived experience. It is the art of practicing self-discernment and awareness. This mindset shift is important becuase engaging it allows us to be curious about life experiences, to be eager to harvest them for new information about who we are and what we need, and so, when an occasion arises, we are extremely comfortable doing what makes sense for right now…because we trust ourselves implicity. Those who don’t have this same level of body wisdom and trust are more inclined towards feeling the “shoulds,” the pressures of the outside world, that lead them astray or at least to a place far from where they think they’d like to be.
Engaging “yukti” means you’re not trying to optimize or perfect everything at once. Instead, you’re choosing the habit that gives you the biggest return – the 20% that moves the needle 80% for your system in the moment. Which means that yes, in this case, baking cookies in the swirl of a the holiday was EXACTLY what I needed to be doing. And eating them is too.
I have some standing favorite cookies that always make it into the boxes. The snowballs, sugar cookies, thumbprints, pumpkin cookies, marshmallow sandwiches, golden milk sablé and ginger cookies are all musts. And that’s already a lot of cookies! But then, I like to add a few new ones to the mix. These tender, chewy, bright, floral and intriguing sugary sablé cookies are my personal favorite. They’re easy to make, easy to love – particularly if you love cardamom and citrus (which sometimes means that the kids won’t touch them so more for us!)
I use Buddha’s Hand or citron for the primary flavor component here, and then freshly grind green cardamom from Diaspora. They’re some of my favorite flavors in the world, all wrapped up in a little nibble ready for tea, or opening gifts, or just a Sunday at home.
Whether your’re putting together your own cookie boxes this week, or simply finding ways of filling time in your kitchen with your people, I hope you make these and love them as much as I am.
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