I was making these sesame peanut butter cookies that are really fussy: I refrigerated the dough for four hours, formed each cookie into a ball, flattened them with a fork, and then sprinkled their tops with sesame seeds and coarse sea salt. It took a long time and it was late and I was getting frustrated. I do not usually use a fork to flatten peanut butter cookies, even though it is the tradition, because my doughs are too soft, but I could do it with the refrigerated dough if I worked quickly (I kept the dough in the fridge between sheets); this frustrated me too, to be hewing to convention without any good reason, just because I could. That said, the thought process behind my cookie-making is often associative; I was making the peanut butter cookies because:
- I bought all the ingredients for Providence Provision last week, just in case the three kinds of cookies Stewart and I planned to make weren’t enough or something went wrong. They were and nothing did.
- I used 2 egg yolks to try to make Cress Spring chocolate fire cookies in the studio yesterday and I often use only whites in peanut butter cookies to make them less crumbly.
- After my glasses broke, my friend’s brother sent me his old frames and I wanted to send him cookies in return.
And because everything else was just-so, I felt I had to let the trays cool between batches, another annoyance. While I was waiting, I started working on a second dough because tomorrow I am going to a memorial service for the mother of a friend whose family is vegan. For this I was making banana walnut chocolate chunk cookies. I hurried through the ingredients and was chopping the walnuts when I found an almond! It made me pause and smile. This must be a fairly common thing to happen at the nut sorting plant but I can’t remember seeing it before; it felt like a good sign, a spirit touching down, leaving an almond-shaped footprint on the walnut ground. And it made me think that I love making cookies.
