Spritzin it up

Anyone who knows me well knows that every Christmas, I go absolutely crazy for cookies.   For the last eight years I’ve hosted a party that has been dubbed Desa’s Slave Labor Cookie Party.  One year we made 1200 cookies in a day.  It was absolutely insane.  But painfully delicious – everyone ends up covered in powdered sugar with horrific stomachaches from too much raw cookie dough snitched off of fingers amidst preparation of literally hundreds of little dough balls.  For scale, see the pictures below.

This is the butter just for the Russian Teacakes. ONLY for the teacakes.

This would be four batches of peanut butter cookie dough.

In the end we usually make six or seven types, but my favorite has be to spritz cookies.  Spritz cookies are a little evil.  They are little butter cookies, about one or two bites, with a little lick of almond running through its delicate crumbliness.  Of course, the cheery Christmas spritz are also a pleasure to look at, and I’ve found that if I color them blue, nobody eats them and I get plenty to dunk in sugary milky tea.

Let’s talk pie crust…at epic length

I had prepped this post back before Thanksgiving, during my marathon of pie making: I ended up with 5 and a cake in the end. The cake was pretty fancy, and it’ll be up here eventually, but let’s start with what’s most important.  And that’s pie.

Most of my pies are rather straightforward.  I don’t muck about with fancy things – though that may change now that I got some pie cutters for Christmas – and I’m more preoccupied with how they taste than how they look.  I understand that you consume the dish first with your eyes, etc, etc, but you consume it last and most memorably with your tongue, teeth, and stomach.  So there.   But every once and awhile, even utilitarian I cave to the desire to make things look pretty.  The easiest way I know how to do that is a lattice crust pie.  That way, it looks like I labored intensely over the baked good of my love when really I flopped it together and went to watch some BBC murder mysteries with a gin and tonic.

A lattice crust is a must when you have vividly colored fruit.

So.  Here is a pictorial guide to pie crust!