Cook Monkeys

Immediately following Matt’s cookie caper, I invited several friends over to make Boyer Christmas Candy:

Candy made by my family every year at Christmas. The flavors vary and the color names are always unique (and consequently bear little relation to the actual color of the candy). If you know him or anyone in my immediate family, you might receive some at the holidays. (src)

There were hands covered in oil, well-lubed scissors, sharp sugar spikes, candy ribbons, Christmas videos, and the sounds and looks of happy people for quite awhile. At least until the new bag of sugar decided to play hide-n-seek.

Read about some of the meaning behind this tradition.

Our third day of cookies occurred on the immediate Wednesday following our previous cookie caper. Matt made cookies this time. He was making “Black & Tan Cookies” as featured on Deep Fried, Live!, an online animated cooking show hosted by an accident-prone octopus. His reason for making cookies was so that he could show them off to people back home who had been anticipating them for about a month.

Matt made too many cookies that night. The recipe makes a batch of about 36 medium-sized cookies, and Matt decided to make two batches because he thought they would disappear quickly. The next day he packed in some boxes and mailed them home so he could give them out to friends over break. He had trouble making the cookies disappear over break because apparently he thought a lot more people would be eating them. Matt now does not want to make, touch, or eat cookies for a long, long time.

After our last cookie adventure with Julie, our friend Melanie decided that she wanted to use our kitchen to bake sugar cookies, because her kitchen is way too small, and we have the most complete and well-stocked apartment kitchen around here. The plan was to bake them on Saturday afternoon, the day after we made cookies with Julie. However, it was postponed to Monday night.

The night started out like any other general cookie making night. Melanie and Mark came over with all the supplies they bought at the local supermarket. Melanie wasted no time getting everything together. She mixed all the ingredients for the dough and spread it out over our kitchen counter. With no intervention or assistance from anyone else, Melanie toiled away in front of our kitchen counter where she rolled the dough and cut them out in various shapes such as trees, bears, and bells. Of course, there was a mess in our kitchen just like we always happen to make.

After the cookies had been baked, everyone proceeded to frost the cookies. Melanie mixed some food coloring with the frosting and produced four colors - gray (which was actually supposed to be blue), green, pink, and orange. Everyone took a knife, picked a frosting color, and smothered the sugar cookie fun shapes with more sugary goodness. Immediately following the frosting, we adorned as many cookies as we could with rainbow sprinkles. Done. Next came the eating of the cookies.

After the cookies were done, neither Mark nor Melanie wanted to take any of the cookies. It would seem that Melanie did not intend to take the cookies home, but she merely wanted to engage in their creation. So, we had the same thing happen to us like when we made cookies with Julie. Our cookie-making-session-instigator paid for the supplies, but we ended up getting the cookies. As always, the cookies found a new home on our dining table. That’s where they rest until the magical apartment imps consume them one by one.

Julie invited us over to make cookies, and she asked, “Should I get the box mix?”

I commented that speech like that was blasphemous and that inviting people over to make box mix cookies was just retarded. So I called my grandma for her sugar cookie and icing recipes and my dad for our raisin-purée filled cutout cookies (made like ravioli).

She bought the stuff while Matt and I made some dinner to take over. We had to bring vanilla, my food processor, and my rolling pin. We ate food and then I tried my best to recreate the stuff the way it is supposed to turn out. After Julie was finished processing the raisins, I told Matt to mix them in with the sugar and water to stew. He pulled out Gail’s nested whisk, pushed it directly into the sticky mess, and proceeded to get all of the raisin goo stuck inside of all 3 layers of the whisk. I had to dig it out with a knife for a couple of minutes.

While he was cooking the goo down, Julie mixed the sugar cookie dough and we put it in the freezer for a bit. We put a tester on a pan and it came out looking like a huge pancake, which means it was wrong so we added more flour. They were still pancakes but less flat so i added even more, and the other folks started playing with the TV. My last set came out right so i started hammering out the cookies. Julie started mixing the icing but found that she couldn’t do it by hand because it was a mostly butter-based icing, so we used the processor. It came out like paste which means that the deocrations she bought (like colored sugared and sprinkles) didn’t stick unless you pushed them into the icing. She and Matt started cutting out the already cooked cookies and were having a horrible time (because you aren’t supposed to do that, but it was still funny). They then iced them rather strangely, and it looked kinda like they were on drugs when they did it.

Afterwards, I started mixing up the raisin cookie dough; it was wet and it smelled like pool chlorine but it tasted right. I assumed that was residue from the crappy Wegman’s shortening in the tub. I dumped flour on their island tabletop and tried rolling out some of the dough, but it wasn’t firm enough. It just fell to pieces. So I tried again adding more flour and the last trial worked. I had Julie start cutting them out and filling them along with Matt. I cycled the cookies through the oven and did some dishes and then poof! Time elapsed and all of the cookies were done and the dishes were done, too.

We watched videos on Jeff’s fancy home-built Linux PVR. His system sucked so I had to shut down MythTV and use the command line to transfer videos (such as Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory trailer) from Matt’s hard drive to the my hard drive to the PVR drive.

William asked me a physics question about baseball and I answered it horribly. We went home and forgot to take some of the raisin filled cookies but we did take some of the sugar cookies.

This week is going be chock full of even more cookies and holiday cooking cheer. Stayed tuned for more updates.

This is cross-posted from my personal site.

One year ago, the Boyer family had a Thanksgiving dinner. Everything was wonderful, my sister and her boyfriend were setting up a fire in the fireplace, we were in the kitchen watching or participating in carving the turkey, food was already on the table in the living room. Everything was fine.

Except, in all of the hustle, the flue was never opened. For those of you not familiar with fireplace design, the flue provides an escape route for heat, ash, and smoke; it also provides for an updraft that feeds the fire a bit. Soon there was smoke filling the living room, the smoke detector was going crazy, someone had to reach into the fireplace with the fire still rolling (with gloves on, of course) and open the flue. We had windows and doors open, smoke billowing out into the clear, cold air. There was a fan running all during dinner and the most delightful smell resembling a log cabin in the air.

We all assumed that this would never in a million years happen again. We joked about that this year: “Who gets to take the picture of the smoke this year?” We made it all the way to the end of preparation with no accidents. All the food was on the table, the only thing left was for the marshmallows to be toasted on top of the candied sweet potatoes under the broiler. Thirty seconds to a minute tops in the oven and they’d be ready to go.

Hustle and bustle created a distracting moment and my mother was called away to the other room for something. Soon after, my sister’s boyfriend remarked, “It sure does smell a lot like marshmallows in there.”

“Oh, sh*t!” exclaimed my mother as she dashed to the kitchen, only to open the stove and have a plume of smoke pour out. Those marshmallows sure were toasted.

She peeled off the black char layer to discover that only the top halves of the marshmallows were burned, whereas the other sides had melted into the syrup. Not wanting to ruin the texture of the dish, my mom added a new layer of white sugary cylindars to the surface and baked for thirty seconds. Twice the sugary goodness, and only a small puff of smoke.

Ultimately a winning combination in my mind.