An Eggnog to Die For by Amy Pershing

Author:Amy Pershing [Pershing, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

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Once Robert and Veronica were safely off on their secret mission in Tommy’s rental Toyota, I presented Jillian with one of Aunt Ida’s wonderful old-fashioned flowered aprons, and a veritable blizzard of baking began.

“The first thing you have to realize about these cookies is that they are not your usual crumbly, delicate holiday cookies,” Jillian warned me as she weighed out the flour. (Tip: Real bakers weigh flour rather than measure it. So they tell me. I am not a real baker.) “These bake up hard. They have to, to stand up to all the decorating and hanging on the tree and all. But kids love ’em. My kids used to eat them so fast the tree was empty in two days.”

“I really don’t care as long as I don’t have a naked tree on Christmas Eve,” I said.

Once the dough was made, Jillian popped it in the fridge to chill before we rolled it out. We used the wait time to make good old-fashioned stove-top popcorn (much more tender than the microwaved version) for popcorn and cranberry strings, which were going to be that night’s assignment for the ’rents and Jenny’s boys. Then we painstakingly unwrapped a couple dozen miniature candy canes from their individual plastic packets and put them into a bowl for tree-trimming time. And then, to my absolute delight, Jillian produced a bag of drugstore chocolate balls wrapped in gaily colored foil and a box of wire ornament hangers. She fished out one of the hangers, saying, “You see? You unbend this little hook at the bottom and just stick the end straight into the chocolate ball.”

I took to this chore happily. This gave me the opportunity to pop a few chocolate balls into my mouth in my official role as taster. They were great. They were chocolate.

Once Jillian had rolled out the chilled dough, the good times really began to roll. Is there anything as much fun as using cookie cutters? There is just something magical about creating recognizable shapes—a frog! an angel! Diogi!—from what had been a big shapeless lump. For those of us with absolutely no artistic talent, it is as close to the creative process as we are likely to get. Jillian also made a friend for life by sneaking Diogi little bits of leftover cookie dough when they thought I wasn’t looking.

Jillian then showed me how to use a straw to punch neat little holes about a half inch from the top of each cookie. “After they’re baked and decorated, you can thread some red yarn or ribbon through the holes for hanging them,” she explained.

While the cookies baked, Jillian and I broke for lunch. My folks rolled in as I was preparing tuna sandwiches made with Italian tuna packed in oil (which can be expensive, but is so worth it if you buy it on sale) drained and mixed with mayonnaise, lots of chopped celery and sweet onion, and served open-faced on toasted sourdough bread.

“Oh, good,” my dad said as he hung his jacket on a hook by the kitchen door.

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