Oct 8, 2011

Creamed Cookies   Childhood

This is one of those stories that will have to be verified by my mother’s journal. I don’t remember my age but do remember that Clair quite often would cook different things after he got home from school. He was the family bread maker for most of his teenage years. (By bread maker I mean not earning money for the family but literally making bread after school each week for the family to eat.)  That particular job later fell to me as Clair went on his mission.  I did it for the family from about age 12 to 17. I must admit that toward the end of high school I didn’t do it very well since activities with school seemed to take over my life. I was also the main person doing chores in the evening and would generally have them done by the time Dad got home from work to help so that took the time I used to make bread as well. Anyway the reason for that little entrance into this story was to explain how I also picked up the bug to cook from Clair.

I loved coming home and watching him make cookies and then especially to eat them later. So when I was still under 10 years of age I began cooking as well. This particular event however shows how the recipe books can sometimes be very misleading to young chefs. I was making sugar cookies as I remember and had most of the ingredients into the batter when the recipe said to cream the dough. I looked at the recipe for several minutes but could not find anywhere that it said how much cream to use. I was very familiar with cream because I loved to scrape it from the top of the milk and pour it over my cereal for breakfast. It was just something that we always had since we raised and milked our own dairy cattle. But that recipe just didn’t give any indication of how much cream so I finally just added a cup since the recipe seemed to call for round numbers of ingredients like a cup of milk or half cup of water etc. It seemed to be very runny at that point and I really don’t remember what I did as far as trying to get it more stiff and I may not have done anything since I do remember the cookies were very flat and all together as one large cookie when I pulled them from the oven.  Later when mother got home from school she explained that creaming cookies meant to mix the ingredients all together into a smooth mixture.

Well, how was I to know?