following

My house is redolent of anise and molasses and sugar and all the good spices from baking cookies all day. I have this ancient recipe from my mom's side of the family for these anise cookies that almost no one likes, and I used to make them with Dad all the time but I find it intimidating at the best of times, and these days aren't exactly the best. But I had to type it up a few years ago for someone on metafilter, and so I decided to try my hand at them on my own with a little help from mlyn, and while it didn't go great, it also wasn't a total disaster, so I figured I'd try again this year because I've missed them. There's just really nothing else out there like them, and much as I like pfefferneuse, it's not nearly close enough, though that's really the only thing in the spice/uncommon-in-America flavor profile cookie I know of. Also since I never really know if I'm going to be around in a year, I wanted to enjoy them while I could.

Back a few years ago when I made them, I asked musesfool, baker extraordinaire, for some advice on the recipe, because baking is just a mystery to me and I'm quite bad at it. She had some really good advice, but did I go look at it to refresh my memory before I began starting on the dough? No, I did not. So I made a lot of mistakes. Dad and I found it was best to let the dough sit in the fridge overnight, and the baked cookies are better when they sit for a day or two before icing, so it's kind of like a three-day extravaganza, and with my fatigue issues, I also have to constantly sit down. I am just fucking exhausted now and I still have more to do!

It makes so many cookies (and that was after my dad cut the recipe down three times!) that you're just baking and baking and baking. I had to shut the oven off and go sit for a while, in between big batches. But now they are baked and I will try to ice them all tomorrow, or at least as many as I can handle, so I can share them with the only people who wouldn't hate them. They don't taste terrible for all that I fucked up, but I can really tell I messed up mixing the early ingredients, and wish I'd read the instructions and musesfool's advice before I started. What a dumbass. Also, it's really a lie that turbinado sugar or succanat can substitute for white sugar. I didn't want to go out just to get sugar, which I thought I had enough of, but it does not turn out the same without white sugar and they are liars.

I bought myself some stuff to make a little Christmas dinner for one, but my stomach was roiling today for most of the day, and ended up just eating a bagel and some of the cookies that caught and were too burned to give away to anyone.

Now that I am so exhausted and the house smells so good, I think I'm going to head to bed early--I stayed up too late last night anyway, because it's my tradition to always watch It's a Wonderful Life on Christmas Eve and then I was poking around in the Yuletide archive for far too long. I was so shocked that it opened in the middle of the day yesterday! I didn't see a whole lot that looked intriguing, since I'm so out of the loop on fandoms these days, but there's definitely some stuff to read and I was really thrilled to see that Rose Lerner's book True Pretenses had a fic written for it this year! So I had to read that one immediately.

Anyway, I hope you had a great holiday if you celebrate, and a very nice Thursday if you don't, and I will respond to all your kind comments on my last post soon, I promise.