The Cure for Anything

How about make love and make cookies?  I love cookies, especially Christmas cookies. My son and I have a tradition of making my grandmother’s sour cream sugar cookies each year. Actually, we eat a lot of the raw dough, until we have a stomach ache. Salmonella be damned! 😉

However, some of them actually do get baked. 🙂 This type of sugar cookie is made with brown sugar and no icing.

When I was growing up it wouldn’t be Christmas without klejner! Klejner is an old and very traditional Danish Christmas snack served throughout the month of December. A klejne is a small piece of dough shaped/twisted like a small knot or diamond and then deep-fried until it is crisp and golden.

My older sister and I would spend hours making these with our grandmother.  Bestefar (grandpa) would come into the kitchen and say, “moder, is the klejner ready yet?” even though we’d just stared the hours long process. (Moder is mother in Danish.)  She’d shoo him out and he’d wink at me . 😉 He did the same thing every year and I would sneak some of the first batch of finished goods to him.

It’s kind of an odd tasting thing, not overly-sweet and flavored with cardamom and lemon peel.  Apparently, it doesn’t much appeal to a lot of American palates  I remember the first time my brother-in-law tasted klejner and said that some frosting or something would improve the taste. We all thought grandma was going to flip out. Sacrilege! That’s okay, more for the rest of us.

My mom and I looking pretty cool in our Christmas outfits, circa 1973.