Baking memories with each batch of Christmas cookies
Friendship fuels Christmas cookie baking
Two friends, Chris Keylock Williams and Lora Giles, remember the highs and lows of baking holiday cookies together for more than 40 years.
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As Christmas traditions go, 40 years may not be a long time. After all, St. Nick dates back to the fourth century. But two Portland women are excited to be marking their 41st year of baking Christmas cookies together.
“It’s amazing to us,” says Chris Keylock Williams, who has been baking with her friend Lora Giles for four decades and has never missed a year. On Thursday, shortly after 8 a.m., they’ll meet in Giles’ Westmoreland kitchen — she has two ovens — and tackle nine kinds of cookies and candy. In their own traditional holiday dance, the women will work intently on their assigned tasks and still manage to visit with each other as they roll out dough and dip peanut butter balls in chocolate.
Recipe included with this story: Swedish Pepperkaker.
By about 5 p.m., they’ll have divided their average yield of 2,540 morsels, tucked them away between sheets of wax paper, sealed them in airtight containers and said goodbye. They won’t need to bake cookies again until the new year.
“In one day, you’re done,” Giles says. And then each of them has enough cookies and candy to give to friends, serve at parties, share with their families and savor with their morning coffee for the rest of the month.
View full sizeLast year, Laurie Doving (left), marked 25 years baking with her sister, Chris Keylock Williams (center), and Giles. Doving moved to California this year and Williams’ daughter Kyla will take her place.Williams started the tradition in 1968, when she and her husband were living in England. She’d met another U.S. Air Force wife and the two teamed up to bake Christmas cookies twice before their husbands’ careers diverged. In 1970, Williams, who had ended up in Portland, invited new friend Giles to join her. For 25 years, Williams’ sister, Laurie Doving, was the third member of the team, but she recently moved to California. This year, Williams’ adult daughter Kyla will take her place. That personnel change is the most recent one in a process perfected by trial and error.
They learned to cool and wash the baking sheets between batches of spritz cookies to ensure the dough would release from the cookie press and stick to the baking sheet.
The almond crescents needed to cool on the baking sheets so they wouldn’t break as they were transferred to a rack.
“We didn’t mind if some of them broke,” Williams says. “We ate those.”
Their biggest challenge was the English toffee recipe they got from a college roommate’s mom. The original directions referred to the hot toffee changing color. Many a batch sugared or didn’t set up. The women consulted with a home extension office and a friend, Jack Elmer, the owner of JaCiva’s Chocolates, before they figured out how to use a candy thermometer and the importance of starting with clean utensils for every batch.
Year to year, their discoveries were carefully recorded on the 4-by-8-inch index cards that held the recipes they had collected from mothers and friends. Today, the cards are yellowed and smudged with butter and chocolate. Williams thumbs through them as if they were precious photos in a family album: Swedish pepperkaker, chocolate-dipped peanut butter balls, almond crescents, spritz, peanut butter cups, Danish almond wafers, rum balls, rocky road and the once troublesome toffee.
The recipes themselves stir up baking memories. There was the year it snowed so much on baking day that the families ended up spending the night together. And there was the time a huge storm knocked out the power in the middle of cookie baking.
“Chris got on the phone and called her son,” Giles recalls. “He said the power was on at her house.”
“So I said, ‘Turn on the oven,’” Williams says, “and we loaded everything up and finished up at my house.”
When their children were small — between them they had seven — the women baked sugar cookies and the children decorated them. Now the kids are grown and have children of their own. The sugar cookie recipe has been officially retired, but neither Williams nor Giles is ready to end their holiday tradition.
“It’s never crossed our minds,” Williams says.”
“No, no, no,” Giles adds. “This is what gets us in the mood for Christmas.”
Nancy Haught: 503-294-7625
Tips from the pros
Here are suggestions from Chris Keylock Williams and Lora Giles, who have baked Christmas cookies together for 40 years:
- Set your baking date a month or so ahead. We like to bake around Dec. 8 to 10 so we are ready for parties and gift-giving. Stick to that date as if it’s cast in stone.
- Do as much preparation as you can ahead of the baking session. Figure out who will bring what ingredients. Chop the nuts. Make cookie dough ahead, and measure out the ingredients you’ll need on baking day.
- Create a checklist and use it. Collect baking sheets, a rolling pin, storage boxes, extra sugar, hot pads, recipes, candy thermometer, aprons, sprinkles, cookie cutters — and a camera to record the day.
- Aim to be “all business” and still have fun. We walk in the door at 8:15 a.m. and immediately go to work. Everyone knows exactly what to do so we can bake and talk at the same time.
- Start small. Begin with fewer recipes. Once you know your rhythm, you can add or change recipes from year to year.
Looking for focus with your holiday treats? Go simple, but use quality ingredients
Much as I admire Chris Keylock Williams and Lora Giles for their baking partnership, it’s not for me — at least this year. I come from a Christmas baking dynasty myself, but this holiday season I’m rethinking my commitment to cookies.
Recipe included with this story: Alice Medrich’s Whole-Wheat Sables.
My sons are grown up and, given the choice between an iced sugar cookie and an ice-cold beer, they’d pick the brew. And, truth be told, I can’t afford the calories either. After eight weeks working with a personal trainer on my sagging core, I want to eat better and not waste a single standing biceps curl.
But I long to bake. The smell of cookies baking, the ready offerings when someone stops by for coffee or my family settles around the fireplace to sip eggnog are essential parts of the holiday for me. But this year, I want to think about doing a little less and getting more out of it. In an effort to stop channeling my mother and grandmother, who often went without sleep to bake mountains of Christmas cookies, I’m looking for a little advice.
Carrie Snow is a former chef and registered dietitian who’s worked for Portland Public Schools and is moving this month to Connecticut. She does not laugh at my dilemma.
“I used to bake hundreds of cookies and send them to my neighbors,” she says. But after studying nutrition, she’s adjusted her holiday habits. “I don’t want to get rid of the tradition, just change the focus,” she says.
“I believe in choosing good ingredients, keeping the cookies small and focusing on a wonderful experience with family and friends,” she says. Her Christmas baking might include an Alice Medrich recipe for whole-wheat sablé cookies.
“She makes them with cocoa nibs, but I substitute higher quality chocolate that I chop up myself.”
Garrett Berdan, a nutrition and culinary consultant in Bend, suggests choosing a “signature cookie for the year.”
Choose a flavorful, good-looking cookie, something that people don’t often make. “Not chocolate chip cookies — people whip those out in no time,” he says. Bake the cookies with good ingredients, package them in a small cellophane bag or a tiny box and give a few cookies to friends and family members.
“If you have this really nice, high quality cookie, you don’t need to give away a tray full or show up with a huge platter,” he says. “The receiver can treat the cookie as something special, enjoy one or two of them with a cup of coffee or make them last a couple of days. I definitely believe less is more.”
Laura Widener, whose Montavilla shop, Pastrygirl, will feature a host of holiday cookies in the week before Christmas, is a big believer in cookie exchanges, but she understands my issue.
“I’d do some soul searching,” she says. “I’d look at all the cookies and goodies and decide: These are the one that say ‘holidays’ to me, the ones I can’t live without, the ones where, if it’s midnight and I’ve been baking for 18 hours already, I will still bake them.”
For her it might be chocolate crinkles.
“My mom isn’t a big baker, but she does bake at Christmastime,” Widener says. “Even if she was busy, she’d always make the chocolate crinkles. They’re very near and dear to my heart.”
The recipe is her grandmother’s and one that Widener uses in her shop.
“I’ve not changed it at all,” she says. “I just use better-quality ingredients than my mother and grandmother could.”
Widener uses European butter, fresh organic eggs and a better quality of chocolate. “Spend a little more money if you can,” she says. “It makes a difference. If you put bad ingredients in, you’re not going to get a high quality out.”
She suggests wrapping up a few cookies, maybe putting two of them in a white cupcake paper and a few cupfuls into a small box.
“You could put in a little note, about how these cookies are near and dear to your heart. Include a memory, ‘I remember a Christmas when. …’ People will enjoy them and you’ll leave them wanting more.”
That sounds good to me. As Christmas approaches and I rethink my holiday baking, I’ll commit to fewer recipes, finer ingredients and smaller boxes for family and friends. Maybe less can be more.
Nancy Haught
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