It's a wonderful cookie: classic Christmas shortbread

Christmas Shortbread Cookies

1/2 cup cornstarch

1/2 cup icing sugar
1 cup flour
3/4 cup butter, room temperature

Combine dry ingredients in large bowl. Cut in butter, then mix with your hands to form a soft dough. Shape into 1 inch balls or roll out and make shapes with Christmas cookie cutters. Place on an ungreased cookie sheet 1 ½  inches apart. If making balls, flatten with a fork. Bake in 300-degree oven for 10 - 15 minutes. Watch very carefully, as these can turn brown in seconds! 

I've kept this blog for - I don't know how many years, and I am not sure I want to check. I do it mainly for myself. It hasn't helped me sell a single copy of my three published novels, though I was urged to start it by a publisher. And after more than three thousand posts, I am finally doing the thing I swore I'd never do.

The lowest of the low points in a blogger's life.

I'm posting a recipe.

But hey, it's a really simple one, and my mother used it before me. Her shortbread always came out better than mine, with a light texture, not flaky, but better than flaky - sort of velvety, like her pie crust. Yet I use the same ingredients for my pie crust, too.

This time of year sucks big-time in a lot of ways, and yet, when I'm not abysmally low and almost despairing, I find myself getting all frisked and sparkly like the Grinch's little dog. And I want to clap myself down in the same way.

Why?

You guess why. This ain't a good world, and please don't tell me about the kindergarten program that makes Christmas cards for homeless people, and how this act redeems all the ugliness and hate in the world - nay, totally negates it. Things haven't been good this year on the world stage, and no matter how chirpy and Jiminy Cricket-ish some people are getting (as a form of denial or, perhaps, whistling in the dark), I can't see it getting much better. To say the least.

That's as much as I am willing to say about it.

So I take what comfort I can - and it's considerable - hell, it's the best I've ever had - from my family, who have always been the best anyway. Nothing else is even close. No matter what kind of failure I think I am as a writer (and it's not that I think I'm a shitty writer, as everyone assumes - it's just that I sold three copies in 2015, and that ain't good no matter how you look at it), I know I am an awesome Grandma. How do I know? To differentiate me from the other one, who by the way is a lovely person, the kids call me "Awesome Grandma", and I don't mind, no, I don't mind at all.

I don't even use the word awesome, or I use it very sparingly, and only when something is truly worthy of the term.

So there!

Feel like I'm made out of gingerbread

So this was the idea, the thing I was hoping to do: a little knitting project, short but sweet, cute enough to hang on the mantlepiece or pop in a stocking.

All I wanted was a pattern. A pattern like all the other ones I've snarfed up on the internet for free.

I saw one I liked. This one. A cute little knit-man sitting in clover. The site, called Big Fat Crafty Mama or something like that, teasingly described how wonderful it was to knit Mr. Ginger, then said nothing about the pattern. Relentlessly, I hunted on.

This time of year can be horribly depressing, and this is why. This is a "craft", a "FREE" craft you can Do Yourself, but who would want to? Hanging this on your tree might scare away crows.

This is a vintage pattern, only useful as a curiosity, but what's this? Someone actually posted the above graph or chart or whatever-it-is, handwritten in pencil.  Just tell me how many rows to knit!

At some point, it just gets bizarre. I am NOT going to knit this. It's supposed to be a "hot water bottle cover", when hot water bottles haven't been seen for 97 years. My grandmother used one, and the plug would always come out and flood her bed. Personally, I think this is just an obese gingerbread man, having eaten too many cookies.

Perhaps this one is meant to be cute, but it isn't. Someone knitted a rectangle, then sewed in some lines for arms and legs, along with what looks to be leg-irons. This little man is entering the oven, and there isn't a thing he can do about it.

If you're going to make a costume as silly as a gingerbread man, why not make it a GOOD gingerbread man, a cute one like the little guy sitting in clover? Though the brown oven mitts are a nice touch.

Having given up on knitting, I found myself in the netherworld of gingerbreadism: screaming victims, ginger-people with obvious and quite huge genitalia. A gingerbread bacchanalle of sorts. Bring on the cocoa.

Oops, this guy's the wrong color, and I'm not sure you can eat him, but he'll work a powerful mojo on your enemies. I suspect the Haitians use the same pattern.

Guess somebody left him in a little too long.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm