[Vanilla Pecan Cookies]

These are the cookies I made to bring for tea at my parents’ last Sunday. Originally, I meant to make cookies using the cookie press that my sister gave me for Christmas last year and which I hadn’t yet played with. Did you ever notice how time seems to move at a different pace for kitchen utensils? I buy them or receive them as gifts, I am delighted and determined to use them, but somehow months can go by before I get around to it.

I researched cookie press recipes (Google is my friend) and found quite a few, mostly labeled spritz cookies. I merged and adapted two of them, lowering the sugar content a bit. The dough came together beautifully, I shaped it into a log and inserted it into the cookie press. I held the cookie press above my cookie sheet lined with ungreased foil (as per the instructions), pressed, and… nothing. The dough was pushed out in a pretty pattern, yes, but it would not detach onto the sheet, no. I figured my dough was too firm and considered adding in the egg white I had reserved, but the dough felt fabulous as it were, so I decided to leave the cookie press experimentation for another day and turn this into a simple slice-and-bake session.

So I chilled the dough in the freezer, took it out, sliced it up, deposited the slices on a sheet of parchment paper, pressed in pecan pieces (organic pecans from the Fairway market, generously donated, along with a host of other goodies, by a reader from NYC – thanks so much Julie!), baked my beauties, took them out, and voilà!, beautiful cookies!

They were much enjoyed by my family and the family of long-time friends who were invited as well — they happen to read my blog too (my parents are far and away my best PR agents, I pay their fee in baked goods) and were excited to try something I had baked. The sablés were nice and crisp on the outside, tender and crumbly on the inside, with the lovely crunch brought to you by Mr. Unrefined Cane Sugar and its team of Thick Crystals (I cannot recommend it enough for your cookies). As for the vanilla/pecan pairing, well, generations of cookie bakers in America can’t be wrong, and it was perfect in its simplicity.

“And next time, you will use the recipe from the little booklet that came with the cookie press, like you should have in the first place! Going to Google for cookies, I tell you! Sheeesh!” Oh, okay, okay, you’re right. But I got a nice and easy cookie recipe out of it, didn’t I?

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Part of the holiday joy for me is to make food gifts for my friends and family. I like to make French chocolate truffles and my French chocolate mendiants, and these Chocolate Florentins are also among my favorites.

Florentins are small disks of slivered almonds and candied fruits, baked together with sugar, honey, and a bit of butter and cream. Once cooled and hardened, these rounds are often dipped in chocolate.

I have had difficulty tracing the origin of the name, but they seem to have been invented by a pastry chef in Versailles at the time of Louis XIV, and named in honor of the Medicis who were then visiting from Florence.

More importantly to me, they were one of my sister‘s favorite things to buy at the corner boulangerie when we were younger and we purchased our goûter together after school. The ones she used to get were large, about the size of a hockey puck, but florentins can also be made bite-size for gifting.

I package up my florentins in little crystal bags tied shut with a ribbon, and put them at the foot of the tree for my family on Christmas morning. They are much enjoyed with coffee after Christmas lunch: pretty little confections that crunch and stick and melt, delivering their tiny jolts of buttery, fruity, nutty, and sweet flavors.

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When I was little and my grandmother was still a young and energetic seventy-something, she came to our house for lunch every Sunday. Now that I am older I’m guessing that this tradition must have been a bit of a strain on the adults from time to time (surely lazing around in your pajamas till noon must have been a tempting occupation too), but to us little girls, this very regularity made it comforting and blissful: le dimanche, Mamy déjeune à la maison.

Every Sunday, my mother would cook the meal — my favorite was her roasted chicken with pommes de terre sautées and baguette to dip in the juices — and my grandmother would bring dessert, bought at her trusted pâtisserie on the rue Poncelet. A St-Honoré (the best I’ve ever had), a Fraisier, a Paris-Brest, a special fall cake decorated with huge nougatine mushrooms that was strictly reserved for my father’s birthday, or assorted individual versions of the aforementioned, which we would share so everyone had a couple bites of each. Except for the baba au rhum because yuck!, said the little girls.

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I finally caved in and bought a pair of stainless steel egg poachers, for 3€ each.

When even the best advice and tips don’t help and your poached eggs are ugly ducklings everytime, you can either settle for a life without home-poached eggs (too terrible to contemplate), or humbly admit to your own failings, and resort to the tool that some genius designed — probably because s/he was missing that same gene.

We tested the poachers the other night, bringing water to a boil in a large saucepan, breaking fresh eggs inside the buttered hollows, and lowering them carefully into the water. We left them in for three minutes, shuffling anxiously around, worrying about the hovering white filaments, relieved when they eventually disappeared. We lifted the poachers out by their convenient tails, drained the eggs on paper towels, and served them on warm slices of garlic-rubbed toasted bread.

The result? A slightly unnatural shape (a sharp half-oval with tiny spots from the holes in the cups), but a perfect consistency. Not to mention, the poachers look like cute little rodents that work as fuzzy inverted mirrors, should you feel like practising goofy faces while you wait for the water to boil. And just how many kitchen utensils will do that for you?