Drop Cookies

Well, I got almost everything accomplished. The cookies are made. The gifts are...essentially made, though not yet assembled. I have a little bit more to do there. Then I need to acquire some cashola and head out to meet my friends. Oh, I should probably get directions to where we're meeting, too.

Here's a recipe that I thought was lost. Literally. I asked my mom to get out the Birds' Nests recipe yesterday, and she also pulled out this one, because we'd been talking about these a lot. Unfortunately, I couldn't find it at the end of the night and worried that it had gotten thrown away during my clean-up. Which was a problem, since last night was garbage night. At about 2:00 this morning I was thinking of pulling back one of the garbage bags and going through it for the recipe card. But then I found it face-down on the floor under the table, looking like a random piece of unlined paper.

These were never traditionally holiday cookies for us, but my mom misses them a lot. She's never been able to get them to come out right - they're supposed to end up as somewhat flattened cake-like hemispheres, but when she and her sister have tried to reproduce them, they have come out flat. I suspected this was a traditional baking soda/baking powder mixup, but it turns out the recipe calls for both. So now I'm wondering if they're properly souring the milk. I read somewhere that milk hasn't properly soured since Pasteurization became the norm.

We always called these "Drop Cookies", though it turns out that that term actually applies to a very large class of cookies - those formed by dropping them onto cookie sheets and allowing them to spread while baking. So my Rocks and Oatmeal Chocolate Chips would also be classified as "Drop Cookies", though the Birds' Nests and Sugar Cookies would not.

The local supermarket chain has started selling near-perfect versions of these cookies, though they vary from my grandmother by icing them. She never did.

A word of warning: I haven't tried making these yet, so I don't know if there's some fundamental flaw in the recipe. If you try them, let me know how they come out!


Babki's Drop Cookies

1/2 cup shortening
1 cup sugar
1 egg, beaten
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup SOUR milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Combine all ingredients. Drop (by tablespoons?) onto cookie sheet.

Bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes.