Hip Hip Hooray!

Okay. I admit it. I like anything royal. And not just British royalty, but all royalty. If Queen Rania of Jordan is on the cover of a magazine, I’ll snatch it up. When Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden married her commoner Prince Charming, I had to know all the details. And in their heyday, I enjoyed reading about the latest antics of those two Monegasque princesses, Caroline and Stéphanie. On a rainy weekend I like to sit with a cup of tea (what else!) and look through Royalty or Majesty magazines oohing and ahhing over all the beautiful gowns and clothes.

And I don’t just admire (or is that drool?) from afar. I’ve had my own brush with royalty. When I lived in Belgium, I had the honor to have tea with Fabiola, Queen of the Belgians. I was instructed that as an American I did not need to curtsey, but I was to wait for her to offer her hand before extending my own. Being the royal lover that I am, the minute she was within an arm’s length of me, I extended my hand proudly and pumped hers with gusto.  A few years later when her husband, King Baudouin, died suddenly, I mourned with the rest of the country running out to buy a Belgian flag to hang beside my American one in his honor.

But at heart I am a true anglophile and let’s admit it, no one does royalty like the Brits. From the investitures, royal weddings, trooping the colour, and Princess Diana to the scandals, divorces, and Fergie they have it all. Where else can you get pageantry and class along with beheadings, abdication, toe sucking, Camilla Parker Bowles, nudity and knickers? The British royal family has been the bread and butter of many a scandal magazine with Princess Diana alone gracing fifty-seven covers of People.

And so, while I confess to not totally warming up to Kate Middleton like I did with the young Diana Spencer, I was truly delighted to hear the other day that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge would soon be parents. Of course I’m hoping for a girl that they will name Diana, but a little William Arthur David George Phillip Richard Henry Nigel Honey Boo Boo Windsor would be adorable as well.

So put the kettle to boil, get out the good china and lift your cup. Hip Hip Hooray!

Have Yourself A 70 Proof Merry Christmas

Have Yourself a 70 Proof Merry Christmas!

My sister is a baker. Around this time of year I can walk into her house and the smell of muffins in assorted flavors or little quiches fills her home. She’s big on making beautiful cookies as well. She likes to get up early when no one else is around and a few hours later her kitchen looks like a wonderful patisserie on some side street in Paris. My sister is a great baker because she is precise. She’s the type that when she brings home something new, she takes out the directions and actually reads them first. Baking requires precise measurements and the reading of a recipe. There’s no a pinch of this, a bit of that in baking.

I’m not much of a baker. I’m a really good cook, but baking, not so much. I don’t have the precise gene. When I buy something new I skip the directions altogether and go straight for the plugging in and pushing buttons method.  I like cooking because if you prepare a soup and toss in the sage and the rosemary but forget the thyme, does it really matter? But try making a pumpkin pie, and oh, let’s say you omit the sugar. What you end up with is a concoction that even the dog won’t eat. Really. My parent’s dog would not eat my misguided attempt at trying to have a healthy holiday. Dogs will eat anything, even, well…, anything, and this dog took one whiff of a sugarless pumpkin pie and turned up his nose.

But for some unknown reason, my mother passed on the recipe for traditional anisette cookies to me. It is my job to bake these cookies, which will be devoured while we open up our gifts. On Christmas Eve morning I awake at an ungodly hour to produce about 20 dozen of the things for seven people. We are ruthless when it comes to these small Italian lumps of dough and even my 12-year-old nephew can’t get enough.  So tossing in a bit of this and a pinch of that just won’t work. I have to be precise.

I meticulously set out all the ingredients, the measuring utensils, and set the oven for 425. I measure and mix, tasting a bit of dough as I go along. But when it comes time for adding the tablespoon of anise extract, 70 proof in case you wanted to know, the most important ingredient of all, I happily revert back to my most un-precise nature and toss in the entire bottle. And then I open up another and in it goes. By now the licorice fumes make me giddy with anticipation of devouring these delectable little cookies with their red, white, or green icing. And what about the icing? I can rationalize the insane amount of anise I pour into the cookies telling myself that it will burn off in the baking process, but the icing doesn’t get baked and at least one more bottle of extract gets tossed into it.

The more I think about it the more I’m sure my mother knew exactly what she was doing having me bake the cookies. My sister would have measured out that one tablespoon of extract with the precision of a NASA scientist mixing the rocket fuel.

Christmas morning at my sister’s home is a happy and giddy time.  Eating dozens of cookies with 70 proof icing will definitely put a smile on your face.

Happy Holidays!