Christmas Cookies!

One of my favorite childhood memories was helping dad bake, frost and sprinkle sugar cookies at Christmas time! Despite this being a favorite memory, I hadn’t actually attempted these in my independence. I decided why not make them for my friends around Jalingo to share the joy of Christmas?!

After getting the recipe emailed to me from dad, I was inspired and started with enthusiasm enhanced by the fact that I was listening to the 2 Christmas albums that I had on my ipod! I realized that cream of tarter, almond extract and vanilla were unattainable. Dad suggested lemon juice as a possible substitute, so I figured that orange was citrus too, so I added a splash of orange juice to replace these three ingredients. The mixed dough was then put in my freezer for a few hours in hopes that the temperature there would dip to the condition of typical refrigerators. The adventure of rolling out the dough commenced with the discovery of my nalgene bottle acting as the perfect rolling pin! I made a few attempts to create some cookie cutter shapes. I tried paper clips for stars and a tuna can with inserts for a tree. These failed miserably. I settled on a diet coke can to create a Christmas ornament…okay…really it was just a circle, but I was using my imagination!

Ruth astutely observed that I don’t actually have a cookie sheet, but instead I have found the broiler pan of my oven functions quite nicely! Then, I had to go find a calculator to convert the Fahrenheit baking temperature in the recipe to the Celsius temperature intervals on my oven. (Good thing I learned the conversion in chemistry class! :)) After estimating where 193.33 degrees Celsius was between 180 and 220, I was questioning how a gas oven relates to an electric oven in terms of cooking time….guess no longer…it cooks faster! After the 3rd set, they were getting pretty good!

Then, it was time to attempt the frosting. I ended up adding about 4x’s as much as the recipe called for in order to get it spread-able. Frosting without vanilla is a little lacking, but I reassured myself that the Nigerians won’t have frosting with vanilla to compare it with! I was slightly disappointed that though my parents had sent me food coloring, it was definitely at school for use in lab, so we had white frosting (though I attempted to add some of my new strawberry flavoring since it was red…it clearly didn’t have the right dye).

Despite the many adjustments, I was successfully able to bake 13 dozen little ornament cookies with joy and deliver them to my neighbors, local shop friends, outdoor restaurant cook, tailor, generator gas guy, grocery store people who find me milk, post office saints, tire repair guy who helps me carry my packages from the post office, internet friends, salon women I pass on the way to the internet, and colleagues from school. It was so much fun giving out cookies and homemade Christmas cards to all of the people who make up my friends and family of Jalingo!!!! Many of them had not tasted cookies like this before and all were surprised and grateful!

I can now say that Christmas cookies, though a secular representation of Christmas, have helped me to prepare my heart and mind for this blessed season! I hope all of you are able to “prepare for Christmas” in your own special way in these last few days before we celebrate the birth of Christ all over the world!