Midwinter baking, a bit early.

So our holiday baking is slowly getting started... last night Grace and I made chocolate chip cookies, which admittedly are not especially "holiday" but it was a warm-up for making Sankta Lucia cookies for her first grade class and my college students. The first grade version will include a whole Sankta Lucia presentation by yours truly - a story, a demonstration of Grace's costume complete with lighted crown, music, and the distribution of cute non-traditional cookies embellished with a Sankta Lucia cookie stamp. (There's also going to be a preschool presentation, but without any homebaked goods, in accordance with Strict Preschool Rules.)

The college version will not involve the story, music, costume, or enthusiasm on the part of the students, but I'm having a shortened class this week, and promised them cookies as an inducement to show up at all. (My rationale: it's finals week, so why bother assigning reading? and if I'm not assigning reading, why not make it a review session before the final? and if it's a review session, surely it can't take the ordinary 2.5 hours. If I make it sound too unnecessary, no one will come; hence the cookies. They looked a little afraid when I said I was going to bake, which digressed into one of my really bad chalkboard drawings of a pastry I wasn't bringing, which is designed to resemble human eyes, so that the Italian version of Lucia is properly honored - she's the one who carries her eyes around on a plate.)

Peter is getting in on the baking action by demanding "pastreats" for breakfast. Waffles were roundly rejected, and since my spur of the moment weekday pastreat repertoire is somewhat limited, we settled on scones. It was nice: he has a lot of thoughts on blueberries, and sugar, and flour, and measuring cups, and eggs, and milk... and so on. He's now bellowing every thirty seconds, "Mom! The scones are ready! Mom!" although in fact they have a few minutes left to go. I have to say, for three, he does a very nice imitiation of the oven timer.