Extremely Multicultural Teacakes

It’s that time of the year again – cookie party time. This party/marathon of confectionery was my second abroad, though this year I was blessed with more backup: Dan and Erin, my fellow Americans.  Last year I flew mostly solo, so I didn’t take them for granted.  More important than their labor (which was nonetheless herculean)  was having my people around me to listen to Christmas music with and crack jokes in English.  Though we did take some time out for Curso dandalu (Curso de andaluz, the accent we live in now).

One and a half kilos of butter combined with only one lonely and hardworking cookie sheet can produce a shocking amount of cookies with enough time and patience.  And arm strength, since I still don’t have a stand mixer here in Spain – and probably never will since those cost upwards of 500 euros each.  I.e. most of my monthly salary.  We ended up with about 450 cookies: two batches of spritz, one batch of gingerbread, two batches of chocolate chip, two batches of oatmeal raisin (right off the top of the Quaker Oats lid, though my oats were bought from my miracle workers at the herbistoría), and of course, two batches of Swedish teacakes.

More Cookies!

Well here we are at the end of January and I am finally getting around to posting about my Christmas cookies.  As I am currently living in Spain, it’s a little unfeasible to ask my friends to come on over to my apartment and have a full day cookie-thon.  It took me about 24 hours to get to my house in the Seattle area to my apartment here in Seville.  That’s a rather large commute.  They’d definitely have to sleep over, afterward.

I apologize that this post is not particularly exciting.  The pictures aren’t that great, and I certainly didn’t get anywhere near the numbers that I’ve reached in the past.  I think I topped out at 200 cookies this year.  A friend of mine came over to help for a couple hours, but I spent an astonishing amount of hours alone in the kitchen this year, laptop on Christmas shuffle.  Well, with my laptop.  My roommates popped in and out, and I dragooned Rosa’s sister Maria to help me decorate spritz at one point.  It was strange to not have my army with me.  Without the gossip and cookie-based jokes flying around the kitchen, I tired of cookies a lot more quickly than usual.

This picture was taken at 11:30 at night, 12 hours into the cookieganza

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.