Umpleby's Bakery & Café

Day 10: It’s A Lamp!

I was looking for new Holiday cookie cutters and happened upon this one.  Had to get it!  My favorite Holiday movie of all time.  I’m the one who keeps A Christmas Story on the screen in the background all day during the Turner marathon.  We don’t have cable any more so I got the DVD. 

This is a sugar cookie with yellow royal icing, red sanding sugar for the lamp fringe and piped melted chocolate.

Here’s your chance to eat a major award for the Holidays.  But be careful, they are f-r-a-g-i-l-e.   That’s Italian.

Day 9: The Madeleine    This cookie is like no other in the countdown.  It is the only one that uses brown butter in the recipe, the only one baked in a mold, the only one that has egg whites folded into it.  No wonder Proust liked them so much!

According to the Larousse Gastronomique, which touts itself as the world’s greatest culinary encyclopedia,  the seashell shape that the cookie is baked in is “attributed to Avice, chef of Tallyrand, the French Statesman, who had the idea of baking a pound-cake mixture in aspic moulds.”  There are other schools of thought of where the idea came from – one that it originated much earlier in the French town of Commercy.   A duke was visiting there in 1755 and was quite taken with a cookie baked by a local peasant girl named,  wait for it….  Madeleine.     No matter what the true origin, this cookie is delicious!

Day 8: The Chocolate Crinkle  As you probably expected, there are going to be a fair number of chocolate based cookies in the 24 day count.    Today’s Holiday classic is no exception.   They are made with the basic baking building blocks plus the chocolate element of Valrhona cocoa powder.  It is now worth mentioning one ingredient you’ll see a lot of during the Christmas baking season is 10x sugar.  It can act as “snow” if you dust it on top of a cookie.  You can coat a cookie completely like the Snowballs or in the case of the crinkle you roll the cookie in the 10x BEFORE you bake it in the oven.

As the cookie expands it creates the crinkle effect which looks pretty cool.  The best way to achieve this is to get them in the oven as soon as you get them covered.  If you wait too long the sugar will start dissolving in the cookie and the effect won’t be as striking.    Because of the high quality cocoa powder we use, this cookie has chocolate flavor coming out of its ears.  One final note on this cookie – you can under-bake it a little to get a chewy cookie or a bit longer for a crunchy one.