As a kid, baking was the only thing my mother and I could do together without arguing. She was nicer, I was polite and my father cleaned up after us in return for the first few cookies. It was harmonious. Add the Christmas music and lit tree in the background and it really felt like Christmas.
My mother liked to bake and I learned that pleasure from her. Every year we spent hours in the kitchen working our way through the usual batches before I would flip through the dessert section of her Betty Crocker recipe book and find a new cookie to try. If it was good enough, it would be added to the ranks of the chocolate chip, oatmeal, butter and sugar cookies that were made each year. Even after I moved out, I would return home to make the nearly dozen varieties of cookies – until last year.
Last year, I realized that I couldn’t be around the flour, I couldn’t risk even a smidge getting into my digestive tract, leastwise partake in the best part of baking – the taste tests. So December 25th came and went without really feeling like Christmas.
This year, I was determined to at least try to capture that feeling again. I started small, buying Betty Crocker’s Gluten Free Chocolate Chip Cookie Mix and their Gluten Free Brownie Mix. Unable to use my mother’s cookie sheets and mixer due to possible contamination, I wound up making them in my own (deeply despised) kitchen using new cookie sheets from IKEA (that were fabulous) and the mixer I got as a wedding present and never used.
It was just me, blaring Christmas music in my tiny kitchen. I tried my best to ignore the fact that my iPod shuffle picked Faith Hill’s Where Are You Christmas as the first song. I made the brownie mix first. Brownie mix is supposed to pour out of the bowl and into the pan, a thick gooey liquid of indulgence. Let’s just say of the gluten free version, that I could have caulked my tub with it. I had to scoop it out and then shake it off the spoon. It did not inspire rich indulgence and was a pain to spread around the pan. While that cooled I worked on the chocolate chip cookies. The directions tell you that the batter will get crumbly. Despite this warning, I didn’t expect to be smashing individual crumbs together on the cookie sheet in order to make a decent sized cookie. It took a few practice runs as the crumbly ends of the cookies burned quickly but eventually I got the hang of it. In the end, I had two plates of goodies, but the joy of baking had been absent as all the fun parts – pouring the batter and scooping out the cookie dough – had been missing, and their replacements were frustrating.
So the next day, after a trip to Wegmans for all the ingredients that were always in abundance in my mother’s kitchen, as if it were some Harry Potter-like magic cupboard, I made cookies from scratch. Music blaring, tree lights on, I began to make peanut butter cookies with white chocolate. My apartment smelled like Christmas as the ingredients mixed together but the dough still crumbled and I had to squeeze them into a shape. It took everything in me not to cry and then I had to berate myself: Who cries making cookies? You’re supposed to cry once you mistakenly eat them all in one sitting and realize you still have to fit into that ridiculously short, ridiculously tight skirt on New Year’s Eve.
With that idea, once the new cookies cooled, I sat down in front of the tree with a full plate of my holiday treats, a huge mug of hot chocolate and put myself into sugar shock. As I sat, unable to move and feeling like a thousand pounds, I realized that gluten free or not, this was a very similar experience to all those Christmases before, and I raised the volume on Elton John’s Step Into Christmas. Perhaps it’s not the healthiest way to get the Christmas feeling… but I’ll worry about that on December 31st.
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