wiseheart | Baking with Mum

... hadn't been planned. I originally wanted to decorate and box my rebellious cinnamon and nougat cookies, cook for two days in advance and measure the ingredients for the marzipan pretzels and the two different kind of meringue-based cookies (Kokosmakrönchen and Ingwerkracher, respectively) that I had planned to bake tomorrow.

After I had cooked the rice, chopped the chicken breasts and grated the zucchini for the stir-fry, though (a modified Mary Berry recipe), I decided to go on with the baking. Tomorrow I'll have to do some more grocery shopping, plus I have to try and fetch Mum's medicine that I hadn't got in the pharmacy where I usually go, and I imagined how nice it would be to just rest after that. So I went on straight with the baking.

The meringues were easy as always. But shaping 83 pretzels by hand seemed a gargantuan task, so I asked Mum if she felt like helping with it. She did. So I dragged our highest chair from the study to the kitchen, further elevated it with two pillows (necessary for Mum to be able to stand up from the chair) and we went to work.

Of course, Mum had never before shaped pretzels by hand. For the savoury version she once used to make, she had a cookie cutter. It took some time till she got the hang of it (I had to reshape the first dozen or so pretzels), but in the end she got really good at it. We were done in less than an hour, including baking the first two tins. Yay!

So, now I am done with half the planned Christmas baking (save for a bit of decorating tomorrow or the day after) and really proud of myself.