Time Travel Kitchen

Baking Day and A Cookie Finale

Chocolate Slices or ‘Chokladsnittar’ one of the 7 traditional Swedish cookies

The most cookie-baking month of the year is in full swing and I thought I’d pull out all the stops with a ‘Cookie Finale’ which I’m starting today and ending next Monday.

I decided to make the seven traditional Swedish cookies that are served with coffee year-round, not just at the holidays. As I’ve mentioned recently, my Mom who passed a few months ago was of Swedish descent, so it feels right and nice to be making them.

Every day this week I’ll send you a brief write-up with a recipe. For this chocolate sliced cookie ‘Chokladsnittar’ I’ve used traditional pearl sugar to decorate (I found online) but sprinkles or sanding sugar work just as well.

Here is the link, I hope you’ll enjoy:

Chocolate Cookie Slices Recipe

Also, I’m really happy to introduce my newsletter writer pal, Elizabeth Held, who has written a very funny and sweet essay about ‘Baking Day’ in her family. It put me in the mood for the next seven days of my own baking mini-marathon. Here’s Elizabeth:

Guest Essay by Elizabeth Held

Our Over-the-Top, Absurd 600 Cookie Marathon Baking Day

Kitchen, 1978 via Getty Images

When I received a jury summons for a three-to-four-week trial starting December 1st a few weeks back, my first thought was, “But what about baking day?”

I wondered if a judge would accept “I have plans to bake and decorate a few hundred cookies with three generations of my family” as a reason to defer my jury duty. I have, sadly, been informed this is not a legit excuse and resigned myself to making an emergency weekend trip to my parents’ house in upstate New York for baking day before returning to D.C. for my civic duty.

This is all to say that my family and I take holiday cookies very seriously. Over one long, sugar-and-butter-filled day, we bake roughly 20 different cookie varieties, easily making 600 or so cookies.

Early in the morning, sipping our coffee and tea while the first batches bake, the house smells cozy and delicious. We eat grilled cheese for lunch, clearing off just enough counter and table space to find a place to enjoy our sandwiches. By the end of the day, when the counters and floors are sticky and textured with flour, the smell becomes cloyingly sweet and overpowering. Through it all we mix, roll, spoon and decorate.

It is an over-the-top, absurd, perhaps even grotesque tradition. But it is ours. And seeing the looks on family and friends’ faces as we deliver gigantic cookie platters bring me so much joy. Each year we promise to cut back and each year, come September, we start exchanging recipe ideas, with the cookie list growing ever longer.

The first baking day I remember occurred just days before my younger brother was born. My mom and aunts gathered in our kitchen beating cookie dough while my cousins and I fought over which cookie cutters we should use and who got to frost which cookie. My aunts kept telling my mom, “Just have the baby now. We’ll take care of Elizabeth.” Days later, when family came to see the new baby—and a teenage cousin with a broken-down car ended up stranded at the house for hours—my mom just kept taking cookies out of the freezer.

Years later, as a teenager, I declared I would do all the baking by myself, as teenagers do. And I would do it all in a single night, as teenagers do. My dad found me at 4 AM covered in chocolate, sugar and peanut butter, and sent me to bed. (Mom, Dad: Sorry for those years.)

Cookie Cutter, 1995 via Getty Images

As I finished high school and in my college years , a younger cousin came to “help”with the baking. She spent her first baking day cutting out cookie dough and, memorably, constructing a toilet for the gingerbread to use. At the time, I found her antics both annoying and entertaining, now I wish I’d made a sugar cookie toilet of my own. She’s now in her twenties but still makes it a point to join us for at least a few hours each year for a bit of the baking marathon.

My new sister-in-law participated in her first baking day last year, marking her formal entrance to the family almost as much as her wedding day. And while I always loved her, her chocolate chip recipe sealed it.

This year, a third-generation, my older cousins’ kids, will join us for their first baking day. I hope they’ll argue over sprinkles and cookie cutters and mold elaborate toilets for their gingerbread man. This time, they’ll have assistance.

Thank you so much, Elizabeth. To read more from Elizabeth, subscribe to her newsletter, ‘What to Read If’ at the link above.

Also, many thanks to Ric Leczel for featuring Time Travel Kitchen this week, you can link and subscribe to Ric’s newsletter here:

See you tomorrow for Day Two of the cookie mini-marathon. 🍪

Jolene