Sian's Christmas Club

There's a scene in Harry Potter where Dumbeldore uses a pensieve to go back and examine saved memories.  Blog friend Sian is organizing a venture she calls "Christmas Club," in which she is encouraging friends to dip into pensieves of their own and recall special memories from Christmases past.  The Christmas Club will generally run on Sundays, but I wanted to do a bit of catch-up with a small post of my own.  Thanksgiving (in America) seems like as good a day as any to share this food-based Christmas memory.  So, I'm placing the wand into my pensieve and pulling out a memory from 1989   . . .

It's time for the annual baking day with my good friend Linda.  Paul and I havem recently bought our first home - a condominium in San Carlos, California.  The double ovens will come in handy as we bake pound cake and three different kinds of cookies, not to mention the candied pecans that also must go into the oven.  We are able to use the stove top for the fudge we will make, though.  Before we begin any of that, though, we pop open a bottle of champagne and mix it with fresh squeezed orange juice. Who cares that it's not even 10:00 a.m.?  It's baking day.  After we have a few drinks and bagels, we start cooking in earnest.  Our music of choice?  Bruce Springsteen, played at high volume.  Around noon, we have some fancy pizza to go with our second bottle of champagne.  We continue to cook and by mid-afternoon, all we have left to do is decorate the sugar cookies. Over the years, we have found this to be the perfect activity to accompany our third bottle of champagne.  By the time our guys arrive at the condo after work, all we are fit to do is to giggle, sing Bruce Springsteen and hit the sack early.   Everyone always loved everything we made (and so I'm sharing the recipes with you today-click on them to enlarge).  But, for me, the true joy of the season was the time spent with a good friend - eating, drinking, singing, dancing and giggling.  On Baking Day, 1989.