The Dilemma of Christmas Baking

 Here are some of my thoughts about Christmas baking.

For years I agonized about the impossibility of duplicating our mum's wonderful Czech baking. It seemed so difficult to my mind. How could I translate those recipes which were in dekagrams to cups and teaspoons? In fact, there were no measurements for the smaller ingredients, like baking powder, various spices and lemon peel. In the European baking world, baking powder, vanilla sugar, and even the spices came in convenient packages, already formulated for one recipe. And what in the world was a dekagram? The recipe might read 7 dkg flour, whatever that was. My mother tried to convert the recipe to cups, but I felt that was only an approximation.

 The first scale I had was a heavy, clunky thing, taking up room in my cupboard, and needing me to carefully balance ingredients, waiting till the weight on the end of the bar was perfectly still. The whole operation seemed very difficult.

One year my brother, Ed, gave me a Christmas present that made baking so much simpler. It was a small metric scale, compact, with a measuring container conveniently sitting upside down on the scale when being stored. Despite the cracks this lid has developed from being dropped, measuring became a breeze. I learned to multiply the mysterious dekagrams by 10 to see how many grams of flour, etc., I needed. Even fruit is easily weighed, when a recipe calls for so many pounds of apples, for instance. My smartphone conveniently converts pounds to kilograms, which are easily converted back to grams.

In the old days, our family depended on Grandma to provide the wonderful baking. Even when I started to bake on my own, there came a point when I was reluctant to do so. Why bake, when butter and sugar was so bad for me? I imagined my arteries clogging with saturated fat. Sugar and chocolate simply gives me a headache, keeping me awake at night, and resulting in depressed thoughts and fuzzy thinking. 

My aha! moment came when I realized I was baking, not merely for myself, but for my family. With my mother gone, I became the baking Grandma. The boys now count on perník, pracny, and rohličky in their Christmas tins. That is when baking Christmas cookies became a way to serve them and bring them happiness.

These rohličky still need a dusting of icing sugar to make them complete, and to hide their freckles, because I used unblanched almonds for the first time. The other types of cookies are yet to be baked.

With all the extra time this pandemic brings, I may even bake Terry's favourites--butter tarts, Susan's Toffee Bar, and carrot pudding accompanied with his mother's special sauce. I don't have to eat any if I don't want to. That's the freeing part. 

It's all about others, not about myself.

Don't look out only for your own interests, but take an interest in others, too. Philippians 2:4