Auntie B's Wax

I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’ve been so busy with all that comes with the Christmas season. That includes baking Christmas cookies. While I’m baking cookies for the season lots of things go through my head. Like, what makes this particular cookie a “Christmas cookie” for me? Why don’t I make cookies more often throughout the rest of the year? And this year I had to wonder, is baking Christmas cookies (or any cookies for that matter) an obsessive/compulsive’s dream, or nightmare?

Take, for example, these lovely little morsels. They have to be shaped into “small” balls. Without the help of one of Martha Stewart’s completely neurotic cookie dough baller thingies, one must be very careful to use the exact amount of dough in each cookie and shape them in to perfectly round balls.

Not only do the dough balls have to be perfectly round, they also have to be perfectly spaced on the cookie sheet.

Then, two minutes, exactly two minutes, before they’re complete, chocolate stars must be placed in the middle of the nearly baked cookies, then baked for two more minutes.  Did you hear me?  The chocolate stars must be placed in the middle.  It would be wrong to have a lopsided cookie.

The thing is, I don’t think I’m too obsessive or compulsive when it comes to baking cookies.  However, when I noticed how absolutely perfectly I executed this project I thought an obsessive/compulsive would be proud.  And what’s more, the recipe said the batch makes “about” sixty cookies.  About?  My yield was exactly sixty cookies.  I’m the boss of Peanut Blossoms.