The three wise men followed the beckoning star to find the Christ child in the manger where there was no room for a bed. They brought with them gifts of gold, frankincense, and cream of tartar, for the world was raucous with uncertainty and in limited supply of valuable goods.
Alas, one wise man was in fact a wise woman well aware of the traditional homemade sugar cookies baked in celebration of birth in Bethlehem. Cream of tartar, a mysterious but necessary sugar cookie ingredient, was in short supply as the 500-year locusts had devoured the tartar crops in the fall, so the cream that had been salvaged from the small harvest of tartar had been dried to extend its shelf life.
Mary nodded and gave the wise woman a Mona Lisa smile as the wise men, shepherds, and Joseph scoffed at the 1.5 ounces of white dust. Mary’s outstretched hand easily accepted the weight of the dried cream; she watched the men struggle through the weighty transfer of heavy gold nuggets and thick sappy frankincense freshly collected from the Boswellia tree.
The wise men made their exit in three different directions. Behind the stable, the wise woman slung off her wise man regalia, then went and discreetly slid in between the donkey and the ox. Her quiet grace felt only by Mary.
***
Writing fiction is painful. I much prefer transcribing thoughts in a rather direct line from brain to fingertips. With fiction, the options are too great and the parameters unknown. And I think maybe writer’s block can occur more frequently: I wanted the wise woman and Mary to bake cookies together, but I couldn’t figure out how to get them out of the stable and into a kitchen, so I left the scene unfinished and moved back into a sturdier reality.
I had two bottles of cream of tartar mid-October when I found an online class on how to decorate sugar cookies with royal icing. I sat for over two hours watching a professional decorate five Halloween cookies. Two hours, five cookies. I found a less complicated design and thrived in the mind-numbing repetition of creating puffy pumpkins.
For the first half of my life, I thickly spread some version of buttercream frosting over Christmas sugar cookies and then loaded sprinkles over the top. This method left the base shapes barely recognizable, aside from perhaps a red hot where Rudolph’s nose should be or gold, tooth-splitting balls outlining a snowman’s eyes and mouth. While the cookies and the decorating were basic and beautiful, the brain-freezing hit of dopamine from the sweet buttercream was divine. The sugar cookie was a mere conveyance of the frosting.
I grew up baking Mary’s Sugar Cookies from Betty Crocker’s Cookbook. Twenty-some years later, that was followed by the best sugar cookie I’ve ever had—a recipe shared on a plate then on paper by my sister-in-law. It’s the sugar cookie recipe that landed in my book. (I also plopped it onto my website with the “Menagerie of Recipes.”)
Since October I’ve made three or four batches of these cookies and practiced my royal icing technique. Over the last two weeks, I’ve taken two more classes live where I pre-baked the cookies, pre-mixed three consistencies of icing in a half dozen colors, then commandeered the whole kitchen to spread out and decorate them as directed by the professional on the iPad screen.
When sub-cultures call, I take interest. I want to learn; I turn to research; however, I rarely experience through absolute submersion. I won’t buy a Harley. I might join a ukulele meet-up some day. But I can bake a mean sugar cookie, and now—with a bit of technology, a whole lot of powdered sugar, and some meringue powder—I can slip into artistry for a few hours.
I keep the home renovation show “Love It or List It” recording on my DVR for an occasional pop of that dopamine that comes from seeing before, during, and after home renovations. One night while watching it with Bill, a scene with a man spraying purple insulating foam filled our wide screen TV. I confessed that I want to do that. I want to spray just the right amount of foam and watch it billow and grow to perfectly fill the hollows between the studs. I will never do that; however, successfully flooding a sugar cookie comes pretty darn close.
Perfection of the flood is a challenge; sometimes I’m left with a product reminding me of the painting of melting clocks. In my case the indication of strange malleability and movement in a normally solid object is not intentional as it was in Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. My melting bells are a result of too much liquid in my flood icing—and/or not enough strength in my detail border icing which should act like a dam in holding the flood. Once the flood breaks that border, there is no return.
(Photo from https://eatdelights.com/cream-of-tartar-expire/)
Back to cream of tartar, that standard mysterious ingredient in sugar cookies. I want to know what it is and why it is. According to allrecipes.com, cream of tartar is “a dry, powdery, acidic byproduct of fermenting grapes into wine.” From a bit of reading, I understand it to be an ingredient that gives meringue, angel food cake, and cookies a bit of lift. I think of it as an injection of a fluffy, white cumulus cloud that has some structure to it.
I’m running low on cream of tartar. With a case of asymptomatic COVID in our house and no cream of tartar on the shelves of my grocery delivery service, I responded rather selfishly to a friend’s offer to pick anything up we might need from the store. Cream of tartar, please.
This wise woman filled a small container from her own supply and left it on my snowy front step. It was at the bottom of a brown bag that was tucked into a plastic grocery bag and only visible after unpacking a puzzle, two cans of beer, and a bottle of wine.
The wings of grace tapped my shoulder.