I HATE HATE HATE Cookie Season

Levels of Hate

I hate Cookie Season as much as I can possibly hate something that I enthusiastically celebrate every year.

I hate it, though I actively participate in it every day from Thanksgiving through early January.

I hate having fourteen hundred cookies in our home, even though I’m the person that makes 90% of those cookies.

So let’s all agree I hate Cookie Season like I hate exercising when I’m tired, or like I hate eating carrots instead of fistfuls of chocolate chips, or like I hate checking my email.

I appreciate Cookie Season months after it’s over, but holy fuck do I HATE HATE HATE cookie season in the moment.

Cookie Season?

What are you Talking About?

I guess before I go any further, I should explain what “Cookie Season” is for those of you that didn’t grow up in the midwest… or those of you that don’t currently follow any bakers on Instagram. #cakehole

Cookies are, despite the lunatic ramblings of a certain monster, an everyday dessert. By this, I mean that people don’t usually need special occasions to make cookies. Cake is much more of an occasion, and the fact that our home almost always has a three-tier cake on the counter truly blows some people’s minds.

Cookies, in contrast, are relatively common. They don’t need to wait for a birthday, or an anniversary, or a reunion to rear their greasy little heads. They’re an everyday luxury, a grab-and-go indulgence.

And then Thanksgiving hits and cookies become a full contact sport until the New Year.

During Cookie Season, which coincidentally overlaps with The-Only-Time-Every-Year-I-Turn-On-The-Hallmark-Channel Season, people take out their favorite family and holiday recipes and make abundances of cookies which they give to each other in cookie boxes or platters. These cookies are often, but not exclusively, holiday-appropriate. They can be iced, but aren’t always. Like the Thanksgiving meal, there are some cookies that would be out of place any other time of the year. For example, if someone handed me an iced cookie with shortening-based frosting in the shape of a reindeer in June, I’d seriously question their sanity.

Participation in Cookie Season is probably relatively low by population, but EVERY family has that one person who thinks they make great cookies. Maybe it’s your mom, maybe it’s your aunt, maybe it’s your grandma. I hate to be gendered, but in my experience, the matriarchs of a family are usually the ones making the cookies. They’re the ones with a death grip on the gingersnap recipe, doling it out only to their favorite grandchildren. Luckily, many of these matriarchs are including their gay grandsons in these contests of favoritism. It’s science.

With the advent of Instagram, Cookie Season has become even more competitive. If you even glance at Instagram during this period you’ll be overwhelmed at the number of soft-lighted marble counters adorned with pristine boxes bursting with perfect cookies. They’re the kind of cookie boxes that look like you shouldn’t sully them by eating their contents. They’re the kind of boxes that make amateurs (myself included) feel like they don’t know how to bake. They’re the kind of boxes made by people who bullet journal with fourteen different colors, is what I’m saying.

A Platter House

I didn’t grow up in a Cookie Box house, though. I grew up in a platter house.

My mom made so many cookies. Correction: my mom makes so many cookies that something as small as a box could never hold them. It is uncommon for my mom to make thirty varities of cookies, bars, candies, and fudge during the Cookie Season. Each of these recipes, by the way, makes at least four dozen. This is the house I grew up in, which might explain this website if you were still confused.

For the record: my mom’s cookies are better than your mom’s.

I know everyone says that about their mom’s cookies, but friends tell me that about my mom’s cookies. My husband’s family tells me that about my mom’s cookies. My dad’s coworkers tell him that. Friends of friends who I’ve never met but had my mom’s cookies at a party reach out for the recipes.

It’s a known thing: no one can compete with Andy’s mom’s cookies.

They’re rich and perfectly baked. There’s a coterie of classics alongside new and interesting additions. There’s always a great balance of salty, buttery, and fudgey, a tight-rope act far too many Cookie Boxes fail to achieve. No one wants a box of spritzes, butter biscuits and almond rounds: too one note. Similarly, a box of chocolate chip cookies, peppermint brownies, and peanut butter kisses would be an embarassing failure: too rich.

Every year we go back to Minnesota for the holiday and I look forward to the cookies. I eat my fill, and my husband’s fill, which accounts for the ten pounds of cookie weight I gain each year. I look forward to these cookies almost as much as Cake Week.

But I still HATE HATE HATE Cookie Season.

Making 1400 Cookies

Last year and this year, I made a pandemic-induced run at my own cookie factory.

It went great.

I’m feeling pretty cocky about it.

The flavors, the textures, the variety. I think I’ve got something good going here.

Like Cake Week, the process involved a lot of planning, and I LOVE planning.

I loved going through twenty-five different books and making a list of over one hundred and fifty cookies to analyze. I loved categorizing them by flavor, texture, and silhouette. I loved debating with my husband for multiple nights about what the final twenty-five cookies would be. I loved writing out all the recipes and creating a pivot table of ingredients. I loved typing up a production schedule spanning dozens of hours. I loved getting the big pile of ingredients.

Honestly, I even loved the labor of making the cookies.

On my biggest day of production I made six different recipes over the course of eight hours. To be fair, I would have been done at seven, but I also made a S’mores Pie as a reward to myself for making all those cookies.

By the end of the second week of December, I made 1370 cookies in 25 different varieties. We gave out almost 900 of these cookies to new friends in our town and got a lot of praise for them.

I loved all the work of it.

I loved sharing the cookies with people.

I loved their kinds notes.

But I still HATE HATE HATE Cookie Season.

But Do You?

I do.

I hate the pressure of having all the cookies in the house. I hate that it’s the first thing I think of when I wake up and the last thing I think of when I go to bed.

I hate that cookies give such little satiation. I hate that I can eat five cookies (easily more calories than a piece of cake) and want another five in an hour. And another five the hour after that. And on. And on.

Cake doesn’t do that to me. A piece of cake is an EVENT. One piece of cake a day is enough to feed the little demons in my gut that scream for blood sugar sacrifices. A piece of cake in the middle of the day feels wrong. A cookie to start the day, two cookies at lunch, two more cookies after working out, a cookie with coffee, and a plate of cookies at night after dinner doesn’t even feel like enough.

I realize I’m describing disordered eating, but if my obession with cakes hadn’t clued you in yet: I have disordered eating! Disordered eating that is kept at bay with cakes and the celebrations thereof!

Cookies ruin all of that.

It doesn’t help that, for whatever reason, the end of the year and beginning of the New Year is a really motivating time. Projects end. Goals are met or abandoned or modified. New hopes and aspirations for the people we’re going to be in the new year abound. It feels like anything is possible.

But the cookies are there as a frosting-coated albatross around my neck.

The cookies hold me back from the New Year. They’re a horde to be devoured before the new year can be born. If the cookies are still here, still hanging in my mind, I can’t move on.

I want to move on, Cookies.

It’s time for New Year, New Me, Cookies!

You have no power over me!

It’s not the cookies fault, I know that. It’s not even Cookie Season’s fault… but it’s a nice thing to focus on. I can focus on those few weeks of my willpower being under constant assault as the problem and not… well, that whole sentence I just put out into the world.

The solution isn’t to abandon the communal nature of Cookie Season, which is why I know next year I’ll make another 1400 cookies, or maybe even more. The solution is to have a healthier relationship to consumption and hunger: to eat for something besides just the sake of eating.

That’s easy to say in January. It’s harder to remember with a basement freezer full of dark chocolate ganache thumbprints, banana coconut burfi, black walnut teacakes, caraway seed shortbread, chocolate and peanut butter ripples, chocolate mint crinkle cookies, coconut burfi chocolate bark, craberry five-spice cookies, ginger cookies, guava pate de fruits, lingonberry kolaches, leckerli, lemon fennel spritz, monster cookies, julekake, orange chocolate cookies, palm beach brownies, peasant shortbread, pink peppercorn thumbprints, pistacho pinwheels, peanut butter kisses, sesame biscuits with pistachios and sour cherries, spiced graham crackers, and triple oatmeal cookies.

Thank, God, Cookie Season is a Sometime Food.

Epilogue

The cookies are finally gone… so I made a cake to commemorate my feeling towards the season, let’s call it my I FUCKING HATE COOKIES CAKE.

I FUCKING HATE COOKIES CAKE

Layers of yellow cake separated by no bake cookie dough and surrounded by vanilla Ermine frosting. Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies explode from his mouth, or perhaps, are being pulled in? Either way, he’s not good to drive.

Cake: Yellow Cake from Perfect Cake

Cookie Dough Layers: Baking with Blondie’s Eggless Cookie Dough

Ermine Frosting: Zoe Bakes Cakes

Brown Butter Chocolate Chip Cookies: 100 Cookies