Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Christmas in April

When I took on this order for my favorite vintage apron design company, Jessie Steele, I felt ready to bake up anything they needed for their product photo shoot. This meant navigating a different kind of "seasonal" work. While I'm just starting to dig up my summer recipes in anticipation of the first berries of the season, Jessie Steele is staging pages for their winter holiday catalog. To sit beside their festive winter-themed aprons in the photo shoot, they ordered this little fondant-covered, holly-adorned cake and a dozen decorated gingerbread men cookies. All together, it was quite a jolly delivery this morning.

Last night, though, the mood in my kitchen was less merry and more frustrating. I went through three batches of cookie dough, tweaking each one with slightly different ratios of cinnamon, nutmeg, all-spice and cloves. Somehow, nothing tasted quite right. When the smell of these Christmas cookies started wafting out of my oven and mixed into the the warm, flower-scented California air, my senses became flustered. Is it possible that gingerbread cookies actually taste different when eaten on a snowy day?