AND PROGRESS ON OTHER FRONTS
The holidays being party over, our latke party, Christmas Eve feast, present exchanges being done, the luxury of time is creeping back into our daily routine. So I can post about my other two big end of year projects.
First is my Italian-inspired cloth. Still not sure what I will do with it, although it’s looking likely that it will end up as a piece of honor on a credenza here in the house. I have finished the outer frame. I started this one on 19 September, at the center of the left hand edge, as seen in the photo below. I marched around the perimeter, opting to go a bit shy on the right hand side to preserve use of the “perfect” corner I charted out. I joined up with the starting spot last week via an extended tendril just to confirm the count and that no fudging would be needed. Spot on, no alignment problems at all. I finished out the join and all of the panel detail last night.
And surprise! I’m not done!
I am working a doubled variant of the edge pattern across the center. Possibly flanked by two single panels. I haven’t decided on those yet. I want to capture the spirit of the original, a towel done in Punto Scritto and Punto a Spina Pesce MFA Accession 83.242, Italian, 16th century, silks on linen. The original is quite large, more than four times the size of my rendition.
More on the developing center panel as it grows, of course.
The other big project was my set of frog hats. Five of them have been given to the recipients, all received with delight and enthusiasm. Four shown below, on consenting adults.
I’ll be finishing up the eyes on the last two this week. I am not sure if I can put out a full method description because it’s a bit complex to explain exactly what I did. But here goes…
First, I knit up seven hats, working in the round on two circular needles, roughly following the general pattern I am using as my source. I’ve used a different cast-on, swapped in K2P2 ribbing for the original K1P1, and arranged the thing so that when the brim is folded, the more attractive side of my cast-on is on the outside of the hat.
Then I took inspiration from a free published pattern for eyeballs, changing the color progression slightly. I used much smaller DPNs for the eyeballs than I used for the hat body, largely to contain the stuffing. Seven hats meant 14 eyes. In retrospect I think I should have made them bigger, but the hat is still true to the concept.
Once the little eyeball spheres were knit, stuffed, and ended off, I had to add eyelids. To do that I used a threaded needle and embroidered backstitch. I looped my backstitches over my DPNs to set up the foundation for a row of knit-on I-Cord. Three needles’ worth, five stitches each. I did this via sewing because picking up stitches across the surface of the eyeball was difficult to do without disturbing the stuffing.
Once the eyelid was done, I went back and using a small crochet hook, picked up a line of knit stitches across the base of the I-Cord on the back, where it joined the eyeball. Those I knit into a triangle to make a dormer-window style cowling. I have to admit that I don’t think I did any two of them exactly the same way, because no two of the eyeballs themselves were exactly alike. That alone would make any specific write-up extremely difficult.
After the eyeball/eyelid, connectors were completed I sewed those units onto the hats, using mattress stitch.
I still have to finish the eyelids and final assembly on two more hats by the end of this week. I’ll stroll towards that completion. No hurry.
COOKIE COUNT-DOWN FOR 2025
And as promised, the family shot of our 2025 cookie plate, with prep notes. Half for the entertainment of those who follow our misadventures, and half so I remember what the heck I did next year, when cookie time rolls around again.
To start, we did two sets, more or less divided between keto/slimmed (lower carb) cookies, and “full octane” ones. You can’t call any of these truly-free, even if they are marked slimmed or keto. I’ve noted below what non-standard ingredients or deviations we took to make the slimmed set.
Starting on the left with the full sugar/regular all-purpose flour set:
Triple Ginger – This is one of the cookies we do every year. My own invention. In previous years I have tried to slim this one, but since there is no such thing as sugar free white chocolate chips, and I wasn’t fond of the texture of the drop cookie style dough when using keto flour, we went with the original recipe. However, this year I used a chopped bar of white chocolate instead of the bagged, pre-formed white chocolate chips. A clear improvement.
Earthquakes – Another of the must-have bunch. This is one of the many chocolate crinkle style cookies. Again, full-octane, no slimming. Just an intensely deep chocolate, almost brownie like cake-cookie, nicknamed because of the fault line cracks that form in the powdered sugar outer layer during baking. This King Arthur version is a good jumping off point.
Samoa-Alikes – Every year we experiment with at least one new kind, to audition it for future inclusion in the standard run. We used this recipe but will probably not do it again. While the cookies were faithful renditions of the coconut/chocolate/caramel/shortbread cookie of Girl Scout fame, we did find them a bit too sweet, and the melted caramel candies were difficult to handle. But the base shortbread cookie was excellent. Able to be rolled super thin, held the cookie cutter shape extremely well, and on its own was buttery, crisp, and an elegant alternative to heavier sugar cookie cut-outs. The extra base cookies on which we just drizzled the dark chocolate after the coconut/caramel topping was all used up were the first ones gobbled down. The intricate work in creating these was largely done by Younger Spawn, who is a cookie baker of enduring excellence.
Mexican Wedding Cakes – Our favorite pecan butter cookie. This is the standard version, full sugar. Enhanced this year due to the princely gift of top quality New Mexico crop pecans from a dear family friend. Ambrosia. Recipe in last year’s round-up.
Cinnamon Swirls – One of our newer faves, and a specialty of Younger Spawn. I stand in awe of the absolute precision of that spiral. And as good as they look, they taste even better. The base recipe is now only available via the Wayback Machine. Skip the optional icing, and use your strongest, most flavorful cinnamon. You won’t be disappointed.
And the slimmed set, last label on the left, and all of the right side:
Slimmed Cocoa-Raspberry Cordial Balls – You can’t call any cookie that’s loaded with booze, truly keto. We happened to have some well-aged raspberry cordial made by another family friend. These things take a while to mellow out, and we’ve been watching it and tasting it for a few years, waiting for it to peak. It did and was glorious. But I wanted to share the last of it with as many folk as possible, so I used it for a batch of cocoa/pecan no-bake cookies. Well, not exactly no bake. I made the keto flour/monkfruit sugar cocoa cookies to crumble to get the crumbs for this and for the bourbon balls, below. One big cookie, actually. Since the whole thing was ground for crumbs, I just rolled out one massive piece, baked it and then threw the pieces into the food processor. The recipe for final assembly is the same as the bourbon version, below.
Keto Iced Lemon Rounds – We usually do a lemon cut-out with painted color sugar icing. But that’s a lot of time on my feet right now, so I opted for a shortcut – plain flattened rounds with simple uncolored brush-on icing. These are a new recipe – keto flour, monkfruit sugar substitute, and I iced them with confectioner’s grind monkfruit sugar sub/lemon juice/lemon zest. I like the way they turned out. Will probably repeat this in the future.
And sad news on this one…. Our fridge is infested with quality cheese mold. I’ve tried vinegar wipe downs, but pretty much any cheese or butter put in there in time will mature into a rinded cheese. It must live on other surfaces, too. I grabbed an older lemon for juice and zest. I rinsed it off prior to zesting, but that wasn’t enough. I theorize that mold spores were on it. While they are killed in anything baked, the icing for these was just the monkfruit sugar, lemon juice, and a bit of zest. Spores from the zest colonized the cookies, and in three days time (two days after the photo) the cookies developed blue cheese mold mottled spots. Not harmful, and not enough to ruin the flavor, but enough to make them unsightly and somewhat suspect. So next year, I will keep the zest lemon out of the fridge, and just to be sure – scrub it down with vinegar and rinse well with water.
Keto(ish) Mexican Wedding Cakes – It would be cruel to Certain Family Members to make a holiday cookie plate with only the full octane wedding cakes. So I did a keto-ish batch. This really should be labeled slimmed, not full on keto. It’s a mix of mostly King Arthur Keto flour, with a bit of AP flour for improved texture. This year I also added a tablespoon of heavy cream to the recipe I posted last year. That also made them a bit more luscious.
Slimmed Peanut Butter Cookies – Another family fave, but lightened. Like last year I started with the Joy of Cooking classic. Teddy natural chunk peanut butter all the way for flavor. But I used the 3:1 ratio mix of Keto:All Purpose Flour; and the monkfruit brown sugar/white sugar, minus about 10% in volume of the white to compensate for savage sweetness. And they worked out well, again.
Slimmed Oysters – Like last year this is pretty much my original hazelnut sprintz/chocolate ganache filling sandwich cookie, but with a couple of differences. I used 2/3 cup of granulated monkfruit based white sugar substitute, and 2/3 cup of the same brand powdered sugar substitute. In all of these bakes, I have I found the monkfruit sugar sub to be sweeter than regular cane sugar, so when I sub I use a tad less. In addition, I find that the granulated if used solo in a baked product can produce a bit of a gritty texture, so I go thirds to halfsies with their powdered sugar equivalent. That’s cornstarch-free, so it’s really just the same product, ground much finer. For these I used a mix of 1.5 cups King Arthur Keto baking flour, and a half cup of regular all-purpose flour (APF). This year’s addition was two tablespoons of heavy cream to loosen the dough a bit, for better performance in the cookie press. The filling this year was a 50/50 mix of Trader Joe’s 70% cacao dark chocolate and the ChocZero sugar-free keto chocolate.
Slimmed Cocoa Bourbon Balls – The other half of the keto cocoa cookie crumbs, pecans, powdered monkfruit sugar, cocoa, and bourbon. This is more or less the recipe I started with, but I prefer to use chocolate wafer cookies to vanilla ones (I will use crushed Nilla Wafers in a pinch). Again, this used the powdered monkfruit sugar, and to hold it together instead of light corn syrup I used agave syrup. Still sinful, but slightly less so than the corn syrup.
Keto Chocolate Chip – Another offering towards full-octane/slimmed parity. This is the chocolate chip cookie that’s printed on the ChocZero chip bag. It satisfies the chocolate chip cookie itch with a slightly cakey, not overly sweet bite. It does miss a bit on the caramel tones that develop in the traditional full octane recipes, but that’s a varietal difference – not a fatal flaw.
So there it is. FOURTEEN types this year. Some hits. Some near misses. And one solid OOPS. But a good group, none the less.
String-Or-Nothing 