What the Spritz was I Thinking?

I love holiday baking! I gift plates full of a variety of cookies at this time of the year to several people. My mom did not bake often, but at the holidays I have fond memories of her making spritz cookies and of me decorating them; adding a cherry, chocolate chip, or nut. So when I make my spritz cookies and my kids do the decorating with m&ms and sugar crystals I smile and think about the traditions that started a generation before.

My mom knew I enjoyed baking, so, many years before she died she gave me her (now 50 year old!) Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer. I remember her saying to me that I would use it much more than she does and so I happily hauled it from Florida to Wisconsin. I love my mixer and the history it represents. It was a wedding gift from my great-grandmother to my mother.

My kids love me banana bread, which is my mom’s recipe, another thing I remember her baking and me eating with enjoyment. So, in the week after she died I found her recipe cards and took one of each (she had several copies of each?) There were a total of six recipes, including one for play clay, two for ruggelach and one for “basic spritz”.

This weekend as I excitedly began my holiday baking my heart got the best of me and I decided, after making two batches of spritz cookies, that I would use her recipe for the last batch and have a taste test in the end. I compared my trusted Pampered Chef spritz cookie recipe with that of her aged typewritten recipe card. The only thing I noticed at a glance that differed other than the quantities was that hers called for baking powder. OK, I thought. Since hers was a smaller recipe I decided to double the recipe. My first mistake. I touched my mixer and said, “Here we go, you’ve made this recipe many times, let’s go.” Four sticks of butter and five cups of flour later I loaded my spritz maker/cookie press, what my mom and I always called her cookie or spritz gun; I would never call it that to my kids.

The consistency was a bit drier, but the dough packed together fine, I thought, and I began pressing out my wreaths as my children played outside in the first snowfall of the season awaiting me to call them in to add the sugar crystals and m&ms. Big problem! The dough was not coming out, not at all. So frustrating, as I decided to take a closer look at the recipe I realized my recipe calls for an egg. Ok, so that would make it moister, but the baking powder must act as the leavening agent. There was no way I was going to go back and add the egg that late in the game, so I took the “log” out of the cookie press and cut it thinking I could use the dough for just plain, round cookies and make the wreaths out of my recipe. I did not want to waste four sticks of butter and five cups of flour! Admittedly the dough didn’t even taste that good raw, and after baking three cookies the dough ended up in the garbage and then I realized something…an epiphany if you will. My mom was not what I would describe as a baker! She was a great cook, when she cooked, she could grill delicious chicken, London broil, lamb chops and steaks, but it was I who was the baker! I laughed as my heart had taken control over my common sense. If you have a recipe that works, that is the recipe that you should stick with when making many, many, many dozens of cookies, especially when gifting them.

So, I started over, my kids happily played in the snow longer and I recalled the day she gave me her Kitchen Aid stand mixer saying I would use it more. How true that has become.

One day though I will try her recipe for Jewish Coffee Cake.