God Jul . . . A Week Late

December 30, 2011

Our next door neighbors, George and Elaine, are a retired couple who are such next next door neighbors that their front door is three feet, in literal distance from our front door, and you just don’t get more next than that unless your neighbors are living in your guest room. George and Elaine also happen to be about the nicest neighbors there are in a neighborhood full of fairly wonderful people, and I take none of this for granted as I reflect back to my early twenties when my next door neighbor decided that drinking beer all day with his buddies was the best way to prepare for building a back yard patio deck all evening which he then proceeded to tear down the next morning while cursing with enough toxicity to make paint blister. You have to have been there to appreciate how much I adore George and Elaine.

Every Christmas Eve Elaine and George play host to their extended family by laying out a traditional Swedish dinner and this year I thought it would be fun to make them some cookies for the occasion. I knew I’d make some flags of Sweden since, let’s be honest, how hard can it be to make blue rectangle cookies with an off-centered yellow cross, but beyond that I didn’t have any ideas so I googled me some Swedish Christmas traditions and that’s when I learned about Tomte.

Now, don’t let yourself be fooled by his adorable little face because this little guy can be a real hand full. Tomte is understood as a troll-ish gnome-ish old man with a long full beard who dresses in regular farmers clothes, and while he’s viewed as a protector of the farmer, his family and land, on Christmas Eve you better fix a bowl of porridge just the way he likes it or there’s going to be trouble. Forget to leave him any porridge and chances are the next morning you’ll go out to the barn to find your cows’ tails tied together, things broken or all your chairs turned upside down. Do not mess with the little man.

Oh, and Tomte wants his porridge with a pad of butter on top, not stirred in. You don’t want to know what happens if it’s not on top. Just consider yourself warned.

And in case you’re wondering, the cookie cutter I used was a gnome from Ecrandal and designed by GeminiRJ. As a humorous side note which I now offer at my personal expense, I seemed to recall that I originally purchased this cutter as an Olympic torch, and then at Halloween I went and used it for this odd little creature. It wasn’t until I actually wanted to make a gnome a couple weeks ago and went off in search of gnome cutters that I realized that’s exactly the cutter I had!

I scare myself at times.

I terrify my spouse much of the time.

But enough about my mental instability and back to cookies.

.

.

Though I didn’t have any full body gnome cutters, at least not to my knowledge but then who am I to know for sure, I found a couple unlabeled cookie cutters in a bin at Michael’s and though others have used it for making penguins, it looks like a gnome to me, or more specifically, it looks like Tomte, and so Tomte it shall be.

I had different plans for this cookie. I was going to flood, outline, and then color in the spaces using edible markers. Edible markers are not only fun but they look awesome and are completely easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy. And so, according to plan I flooded each cookie with white glaze and once they were dry I outlined with black glaze using a 1.5 piping tip. It was only when I pulled out my pens and discovered most of them had dried out that I ended up whipping up some colored glaze as fill. It would be so convenient if I had small children to blame for leaving the caps off the pens, but I don’t have children and the cats don’t have opposing thumbs so my bad.

As it turned out I’m happier with the final results because of the added texture I was able to get in with the dots and plaids and swirly beard thingies. I wanted to have a more muted color palette than the normal greens and reds of Christmas and so I added a couple tablespoons of unsweetened cocoa to all the colors which not only gave me the tones I wanted but masked the bitter aftertaste you can get when using darker color gels. Oh, and unless I’m going for vivid colors, I always add a finger-wipe to a drop of ivory gel as I did with these cookies because just enough but not too much softens the colors.

I love these little guys, I really do.

This was the final platter which I delivered by walking out the front door and side-stepping three feet to the right.

No shipping charges involved.

Posted in Christmas, Cookies