my first treacle

I’ve always read about trea­cle! Just the word sounds so dis­taste­ful, does­n’t it? And then there’s the dire-sound­ing “trea­cle tart,” and even peo­ple in Eng­lish nov­els are described as “trea­cly,” which I always took to mean some­thing like nasty and tru­cu­lent. That’s why, the word sound like “tru­cu­lent.” Or lit­tle chil­dren wak­ing up from “trea­cly” night­mares, which I imag­ine is when your feet are stuck in trea­cle and you can­not escape The Bad Guy. How unfair on trea­cle, in any case, as it turns out. Because it’s molasses. And boy does it make a good cookie.

In the course of mak­ing these cook­ies, I learned sev­er­al things the hard way, about bak­ing in Eng­land. One, you can­not use “plain” sug­ar. It is too coarse and does­n’t meld with the but­ter prop­er­ly, so the cook­ies were not flat and shiny, they were plump and mat­te. Also, bak­ing soda, or “bicar­bon­ate of soda” as it is rather bald­ly named here (always sounds like a mur­der mys­tery where some­thing is sup­posed to be arsenic and isn’t) is only “sin­gle” ris­ing, not dou­ble as it appar­ent­ly is in Amer­i­ca. What­ev­er. They were deli­cious at our house too.

Trea­cle and Cin­na­mon cookies

4 cups all-pur­pose flour
1 1/2 tsps each ground cloves, cin­na­mon and gin­ger
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tsps bak­ing soda

1 cup but­ter, soft­ened
3 1/2 cups cast­er sug­ar
1 cup black trea­cle
2 large eggs

In a medi­um bowl, mix togeth­er dry ingre­di­ents. Did you know you have to run a fork all through a new bag of flour, to rus­tle up the air pock­ets so you don’t get too heavy a quan­ti­ty? I did­n’t either, but my moth­er in law put me right. The things she knows. Any­way, then with a mix­er (since the move we can find only one of the beat­ers and we don’t rec­om­mend mix­ing with one beat­er!) cream togeth­er the but­ter and sug­ar, then add the trea­cle and the eggs. Now grad­u­al­ly mix in the flour. It will seem like too much dry ingre­di­ents, but it isn’t. I looked over my moth­er in law’s shoul­der, being involved with cook­ing the oth­er parts of the meal myself, and she per­se­vered to good effect.

Bake for 10–12 min­utes at about 180 in Eng­land, 350 in Amer­i­ca. Yum yum. And in fact, if you want to spend/waste a lot of time look­ing at the ways we do things dif­fer­ent­ly in the kitchen in the UK and in Amer­i­ca, go to this fas­ci­nat­ing site. You can get lost in all the dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lary in this osten­si­bly “same lan­guage” situation! 

I must fin­ish email­ing all the var­i­ous peo­ple to whom I have dou­ble-booked, over­com­mit­ted and oth­er­wise screwed up in my vain attempt to organ­ise our hol­i­day sea­son. For exam­ple, doubt­less my child, although clear­ly remark­able in every way, can­not be at both Grace’s cook­ery par­ty and Juli­a’s ice skat­ing date, which hap­pen at pre­cise­ly the same times on Fri­day. Like­wise not arrange for Anna to come play while Avery in fact is at the Olympia Horse Show. I must also make a Men­tal Note to in fact be here when I host Sophi­a’s fam­i­ly for a tea par­ty tomor­row. Oh well, they’ll remind me when I see them at the school Christ­mas con­cert tomor­row at All Souls’ Church. Unless I for­get to go…