Mistaken Textual content Message Vanilla Bean Cookies
A Recipe From a Unsuitable Quantity
In December 2021, I acquired a textual content message thanking two individuals named Amy and Laura for cookies.
Initially, I shrugged it off as a fallacious quantity. However all through the week, I continued to obtain a flood of texts thanking Amy and Laura for his or her cookies, together with a number of requests for the recipe. Because the texts persevered, I pieced collectively the clues and deduced that Amy and Laura have been a married couple in California who had delivered selfmade Christmas cookies to their neighbors, and there had been a typo in Amy’s cellphone quantity within the accompanied card, inflicting all of the texts to be misdirected to, properly, me.
Naturally, I needed to know what all of the fuss was about, so I finally requested if I might even have this recipe that appeared to have your entire neighborhood speaking. Laura thanked me for being an excellent sport in regards to the confusion and despatched me an image of a quaint recipe card for “Vanilla Bean Cookies,” a “Kolowith household recipe” that’s “historically baked at Christmas.” It seems the recipe comes from Laura’s great-grandmother—the supply is unknown, nevertheless it’s been their household’s favourite Christmas cookie recipe for a number of generations. She warned me the recipe makes a “TON of cookies,” so I would wish to halve it or simply do what she did and share with neighbors. She additionally instructed utilizing extra powdered sugar than the recipe requires.
I thanked her, and we even ended up exchanging selfies of ourselves with our respective companions. It occurred to be snowing, which solely added to the vacation magic of the day. This easy, serendipitous encounter simply introduced me a lot queer pleasure. I’m so used to having to hunt out different queer individuals, however this time, by a coincidence, they discovered me.
I’ve been wanting to include this well-known cookie recipe into my yearly traditions ever since, and this 12 months, I lastly determined to make it. Laura wasn’t kidding—it makes a TON of cookies. It calls for at least a pound of butter and 5 cups of flour, however was comparatively straightforward to tug collectively: You cream butter and sugar in a mixer, add flour and an egg, roll the dough out into logs, chill them, slice them, bake, and at last, roll the nice and cozy cookies in a combination of vanilla bean and powdered sugar. The toughest half was shooing my butter fiend of a cat away from the counter a number of instances.
To pay it ahead, now I’m sharing the recipe with you (with permission, after all!). I additionally plan to ship a number of the cookies to individuals in my group who I respect, like my yoga instructors, native library workers, and the hanging Starbucks employees. In case you make them, I like to recommend doing what Laura and Amy did and distributing them amongst your neighbors. Who is aware of—possibly you’ll even spark a brand new custom!
My suggestions:
🍪 Make sure that your elements are all room temperature. I used to be in a rush, so I used this trick from Sally’s Baking Habit to shortly soften my butter and positioned the egg in a bowl of heat water for 10 minutes.
🍪 The unique recipe card doesn’t say when so as to add the egg, so I combined it in with the flour after creaming the butter and sugar, which labored out high quality.
🍪 I weighed the flour out with a scale (5 cups of flour equates to about 600 grams).
🍪 I additionally used my kitchen scale to divide the dough into two comparatively even balls. I rolled these balls into tough logs, then rolled them up with parchment paper and used a bench scraper to easy them out into neat cylinders. Lastly, I twisted the edges tightly to seal them like a sweet wrapper (or a large blunt) earlier than chilling them within the fridge for just a few hours.
We’re counting right down to 2025 by sharing a few of our favourite cookies on Slog day-after-day in December! As a result of life is tough, and sugar helps. Will issues get bizarre? Possibly! There might have been a small fireplace through the first photograph shoot! However hopefully, you may additionally uncover some new favourite treats to take pleasure in this season. Monitor our day by day suggestions right here! 🍪
