Sugar Cookies

This dough holds its shape beautifully through baking. It makes firm Sugar Cookies that are easy to work with and perfect for decorating. Topped with Royal Icing and colorful decorator sprinkles they make an attractively sweet holiday expression.

Waiting For the Timer

Here I am, sitting in the corner of my kitchen on a stool, looking out the window. I have cookies baking in the oven. The kitchen smells like sugar and vanilla. I have Andrea Bocelli playing in the background, singing songs filled with emotion that rises in my heart and spreads over me like a magic cloak, transforming all that is cold, pale or unsubstantial. I have no idea what the Italian words he is singing mean but the rich sound of the music and the thick amber tone of his voice is like honey. Warm and sticky with the sweetness I feel like a contented cinnamon roll.

I am waiting for the oven timer to go off. Often enough when I am baking I wander and get involved elsewhere and lose track of the timing, ruining a promising foray in the kitchen. I don’t want that to happen today. I want the cookies to be perfect.

So I sit here, near the oven, and I look out the window. I consider the landscape, inspect the beds from this distance. I cleaned up most of the plant debris from withered perennials last fall but there were a few plants that I skipped because something about them seemed interesting or beautiful as they were. Those draw my attention now. One such clump of daylilies is framed, from this angle, by my kitchen window.

An Active Garden

Last season’s tall sword-like leaves are now gray-brown and bent, folded onto themselves, kneeling toward the ground. Their tips look as if they have melted into the bark mulch beneath them. They are dismal and spent. The Zen garden rake lies beside them and my four ornamental bunnies sit in front of the clump somewhat out of kilter.

As I sit and gaze at this scene my first thoughts are of what I need to do in the yard, of how I need to get things cleaned up for spring… but then I stop myself. My eyes rest on the bunnies.

I study them. They seem to be wallowing in the spent leaves. I think they are whispering and laughing. One is so amused he has fallen over and mashed his ear. Then I study the gray clump of daylilies and realize that new blades of spring green are poking up through the nest of old leaves, reaching toward the light like baby birds with their mouths wide open.

Those sprouting daylilies are tall for so early in the year, no doubt warmed by the mellowing of their nest of last years leaves. The bright green rising above and surpassing the gray is really quite beautiful in a strange way and suddenly I forget everything, my cookies, the music, the yard work I need to do, and think instead that I must get my camera and take a picture of this beautiful thing that God has done in my yard.

Quirky Spring Moments

And then I notice that I am smiling! What’s more I realize that to find beauty and to notice that I am smiling must mean that I am happy, and, for some reason, that amazes me. Not that I have any reason not to be, but, then again, this quirky spring moment seems huge.

I am happy with my camera. There are a million incredible revelations open to be photographed. I am happy that I have the opportunity to take those photos and to offer them to others. I am also happy that I have my writing, to share what’s in my heart.

Outside I see that there are laughing concrete bunnies in my yard watching spring break out of winter’s cold gray bed, break out and push up toward the sky, spiky and green. No matter that their nest is messy and in disarray, no matter that the bunnies are laughing, they break forth in their own time and show their colors to the world. I join the bunnies and laugh, and with the daylilies I stretch toward the sky.

Blessing Among the Broken

The timer goes off. Yikes! I should have checked sooner. Some of my cookies are a little too brown around the edges and I broke one putting it onto the wire rack. Yet even that seems right. I will decorate it as a broken heart. These cookies are big enough to share anyway. This one isn’t perfect, but it can be meaningful and beautiful in it’s own way.

In the words of a baker, “To make a cake, you have to break some eggs.” We have to break open and offer what we know we have in order to create more. It is like the Parable of the Talents in the Bible or the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. My writing “encourager” recently shared these words, “taken, blessed, broken, shared.” It is a reference to faith, and to the act of offering our gifts. So often we find that what is offered, spread and shared, brings back more.

So…I offer you my photos and my words as I try to share my joy. And then there is this recipe for cookies too…..