I've done a lot more cooking since we arrived in Spain and my most recent plunge into domesticity was really fun! A few of us from the embassy and the university got together and did a cookie exchange. About 6 of us were involved so we all made 6 dozen of a specific type of cookie and then brought it along to the cookie exchange. We then got to taste everyone else's cookies and box up a combination of every type and take it home to pass out for gift plates. I handed out a dozen or so varied Christmas cookies to our portero (doorman - who is actually a woman), my law office, and the hubbys office. (we kept one or two cookies for ourselves as well...) Everyone was thrilled with the results and the whole afternoon was pretty fun.
My contribution to the cookie exchange was thumbprint cookies. There are a few steps involved but overall it's a really simple cookie to make.My recipe made about 3 dozen cookies, so I prepared 3 dozen the night before and 3 dozen the day of the cookie exchange.
I filled the cookies with plum jam and they looked festive and tasted yummy!
The cookies the other ladies brought were fantastic: Iced oatmeal cookies, brownies frosted with peppermint frosting, sugar cookies shaped like candy canes, some yummy swedish cookies, lemon cookies, oatmeal chocolate chip, chocolate with peanut butter chips - I was stuffed after trying everyone's treats but it would have been rude to pass any up, right?
The host, Kate, threw a great party and made some fantastic chile to counter-act the sugar high we were all suffering shortly after diving into the cookies. Another of the women from the embassy brought a Betty Crocker cookbook from 1963 that her mother had passed on to her (she used the recipe in the cookbook for the candy cane sugar cookies) and it had a suggestion for a cookie exchange party. It was kind of funny reading the description in the book of how to throw a great cookie party - it included having all of the ladies go around the room and describe where their cookie recipe came from, what it meant to them, etc. I think most of us had just downloaded the recipe off the internet and didn't have any nice story about our recipes. But we did have a nice time chatting about 101 other things. As many of the women work at the embassy in the political or economic division, they have interesting perspectives on a variety of things going on the world now. Eva, having spent 18 years in the mortgage industry had some great insight into the current mortgage crises, and the rest of us are pretty ready to hold forth on just about any topic that pops into our heads. I imagine it was a different type of conversation than might have been had back at a cookie exchange party in 1963, but maybe I'm wrong. The basic enjoyment of getting together with friends for good food and conversation is the same now as I imagine it was 40 years ago and will probably be the same 40 years from now. The future cookie-exchanger Louisa, Kate's little one year old, already seemed to enjoy the fun and will probably head up her own cookie party sometime in the future.
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