Grandmothers are a gift not to be taken lightly. So many lose them before they are old enough to know their magic. ~ Nikita Gill

Granny’s Christmas Sugar Kisses

I like Thanksgiving and as a result I have some traditions related to what I do on Thanksgiving, the cooking I do, my annual hike. These all stem from traditions that were built as I was a child related to the holiday.

Christmas, as regular readers will be aware, is not my favorite holiday by a long shot, I downright dislike it. As such, I don’t have a lot of traditions around Christmas, the biggest one I have now is retreating from humanity and spending some alone time in the desert, doing a naked hike weather permitting. There is one tradition the last few years that I have tried to replicate from my childhood. The one thing I could count on every single Christmas for many, many years were Granny’s Christmas cookies. She made several, but there was one that was my favorite, her peanut butter kisses.

I took it for granted for so long that these would always be there every Christmas. My granny made sure, she shipped them to all the far flung places I found myself while she was alive. And after she passed my sister would make them some years and they were good, nostalgic, but not quite the same. Over the last few years I’ve found myself really missing this last piece of my granny.

A little about my granny, she was maybe the most significant person in my life. She’s absolutely the person who is responsible for the person that I am. My granny was the only person I’ve ever known who absolutely had unconditional love for me. She loved me an insane amount, one reason was I was a connection back to her husband, my grandpa POW. He died when I was five years old and I was the only grandchild that had any memory of him, I think that made me a bridge to him for her. My childhood was fucked up and honestly, I should have turned out to be a dangerous psychopath. But what interrupted that path was quite simply my granny’s love. Her constant attention, her constant positivity, her constant compliments. She told me over and over and over that I was smart, good, kind quite simply that I was special. And because she never lied to me, because she was always there for me, I believed her and it’s the reason I possess the self-confidence that I have today. She was my hero.

She was also a Kentucky hillbilly to the core. She grew up literally dirt poor, in a house with dirt floors and no indoor plumbing. If you know granny from the Beverly Hillbillies TV show, you’re not terribly far off from my granny. She was tiny, mighty and ready to rumble to her last day. Hillbillies are the hardest people on Earth to kill, seriously, they’re like cockroaches, you have to drop a bomb on these people. As such she lived til 90, beat cancer and did it all with her own style. The picture I used for the post is my favorite of her, very near the end of her life, I call it her Lou Reed shot.

So missing my granny, and her cookies, like her meatballs before them, I started trying to make them. Years ago I worked out her meatball recipe and now I’m trying to figure out her cookies. Over the last several years I’ve gotten pretty good at making them, but there was always something missing and in my head it was sugar, but it made no sense. I was confused and one year even made them as sugar cookies instead of peanut butter cookies. The texture was right, the taste was not. I’m a cook, not much of a baker but I don’t give up easily. And now, as of yesterday, this Christmas I think I’ve got it. So, I understood the cookie and never did the most basic thing and look at recipes for these cookies, that are typically called peanut butter blossoms. Now, I’m not an idiot, I had looked at a couple of recipes before, but this time I dug in through a bunch of them and one solved the mystery for me, and it was sugar.

You see, after you make the peanut butter batter and roll them into balls, you roll them briefly in sugar and start the baking process. The other piece that I had been missing, I would fully bake the cookies and pull them out, insert the chocolate kisses and that didn’t leave them cracked, a tiny thing but it always bothered me. You see what I was missing, besides the sugar was that you should cook the cookies until about two-minutes short of done, pull them out, place the kisses and finish baking for the last two minutes browning them. The recipe I found specifically mentioned that pressing the kisses in at that point would cause cracks in the cookies, perfection. I’m excited this weekend to make a bunch to take with me into the desert, to sit upon a rock in the setting sun in my favorite spot in the Valley of the Fire, eat a few cookies and think about my granny, merry Christmas to me and a happy day in the desert my friends . ~ Rev Kane