How I learned to bake
cookies:
In 1980, the year we got engaged, I started baking cookies with my future
mother-in-law, Sylvia Olson. She's an excellent baker who makes fantastically
yummy cookies. We always told her that she should open up a bakery.
Syl, in turn did a lot of baking with her mother-in-law, the late Anna Olson.
(Both my husband's paternal grandparents were from Sweden). My favorite
peanut butter cookie recipe
came from Anna, (whom I never met, she died in the 1960's.) I can still picture
Syl piecing together the three yellowed scraps of paper with the original
handwritten recipe on it.
My father in law, Melvin Olson, was the General Manager at the Jesuit Noviate
in Santa Barbara from the mid 70's, until he died in 1988. Mel would bring
home industrial sized sheets of parchment paper that Chef Veane, gave him.
Veane told Mel that using parchment to line the baking sheets with was the
professional "Bakers Secret". If it was good enough for professional
bakers, it was good enough for the Olson's! We cut ours with scissors to
fit a home sized baking pan.
The Olson family tradition (which my sisters-in-law, Jackie and Beth, still
continue to do) is to bake about 12 different kinds of cookies and give them
away to friends, relatives, co-workers, etc. For at least 8 hours a day for
three days, we would have a production line of dough rolling, slicing, chopping
nuts, sprinkling, baking, and finally transferring the cookies to the cooling
racks. It was like being in the cookie army!
It was (still is!) a lot of work, but totally worth it! After I came on to
the scene my husband "retired" from active cookie duty, but maintained his
post as "chief cookie taste tester". Once we moved to Maryland, I continued
the tradition, and now our daughter, Stephanie, helps with the cookie parade.
We have three "professional taste testers":
Dad, David and Sean.
***This page was originally written in 1997. My mother in law, Sylvia, died
in June 2006 at age 85. "Thanks for teaching
me how to bake, Syl. Rest in Peace."
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