My muse likes sugar.
I like sugar also, which makes for a great partnership. Often when I sit down to tackle a particularly ambitious piece of writing, something that is going to keep me at my laptop for a couple of hours, it helps to dose up on sugar first.
Sugar appeases the muse, jump starts my mind and gives me that boost I need to get things rolling on the keyboard. Intellectually I understand why this might not be the healthiest ritual—inducing a sugar high.
There are probably health conscience types reading this right now who are screaming in their heads (by the way I can’t hear you) how wrong this is and asking, “do I want to die young? (Too late for that.) My response to all of that is, I need my muse to be happy, and if sugar is what she needs and wants, I am giving it to her. My preferred delivery method is frozen dairy products—ice cream more specifically. Even so, cookies—with milk of course—will do the trick.
In my post last week, Success and Cookies, I gave my secret formula (or recipe) for success; persistent trial and error, based on intelligent choices. I concluded that if I followed this recipe—which was in keeping with my baking analogy—the result would be success. “Like a batch of cookies out of the oven. . . success cookies!”
Allow me to introduce you to my favorite cookies—lemonade cookies. Lemonade cookies are a soft buttery cookie that dissolves in your mouth. They are infused with pink lemonade that is baked into the dough, and then brushed with lemonade concentrate and sprinkled with sugar when they come out of the oven.
When I was a kid, my mom—who passed away earlier this year—made these cookies and I would eat them by the dozens. The first time she made them for me was a time that I was having a really bad day. I don’t remember what I was so upset about, but these cookies coming out of the oven turned that day around. They proved that if life hands you lemons, you don’t just have to make lemonade, you can make lemonade cookies, which are even better—so much better.
These cookies were the start of my education in cooking also. One day my mom decided it was time for me to learn how to make them for myself. Yes, she could continue to give a boy a cookie and he would eat for a day or she could teach that boy how to bake and he could eat those cookies for a lifetime.
If ever there was a cookie with meaning and life lessons attached to it, these lemonade cookies are it for me. It had been years since I made these cookies. The other day, however, I found the recipe, fired up the oven, donned an apron (got to keep my shirt clean) and made a batch. They came out just like I remembered, light, fluffy, tart and sweet—my mouth waters as I write this. I decided that if ever there was a thing as success cookies, for me these are it.
What better offering to my muse—and memorial to my mother? Oh sweet, sweet success indeed! It just goes to show that the lemons of life can be made into the cookies of today.
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