Horse Cookies

My great aunt never married, had a career as a journalist and a newspaper editor, liked sport, and did crossword puzzles. She had a large purse in which she carried a a small notebook with an elastic around it, as there were little slips of paper tucked in all over. She was constantly scribbling words and clues - I think she wrote crosswords as well as solving them.

She had a little dressing table at which she had tweezers (for that annoying hair on her chin), a black eyebrow pencil, a silver case of face powder, and small bottles of perfume.

She was not a domestic woman. At home, I'm certain she subsisted on tea, rye bread, cheese and eggs. I think she ate out a lot.

She also played bridge and took turns hosting. As the host's duties did include serving a bit 'something', she developed a signature recipe. This is the one thing she cooked.

I have a very old sheet of paper with a pencilled recipe written by my mom "Ciastka Konskie Kingi". It took me several tries to convert the recipe's "approximations" into an actual measured recipe. Amelia makes them now.

Kinga's Horse Cookies

1/2 cup butter or margarine
3 Tbsp cocoa
3 cups sugar
7 Tbsp milk
1/4 tsp almond flavour (optional)

Put all above ingredients into a pot with a thick bottom and melt over medium heat until sugar is dissolved, stirring constantly. Keep stirring over heat for another minute or so. Remove from heat and immediately add to the pot:

3 cups rolled oats (regular old fashioned)

Quickly stir until the oats turn brown. Drop by big spoonfuls onto parchment paper, wax paper, or aluminum foil which you have laid out on the counter. DO NOT LICK THE SPOON until the end of the batch, when you're sure it's cool.

Let the cookies cool and peel them gently off the paper/foil.

Pour cold water into the pot, let it sit for about 20 minutes and the pot will pretty much clean itself.

The only problem with these cookies is that it's difficult to steal them from the counter. When regular cookies are cooling on a rack, you can pinch a couple and until your child starts counting them as she makes them so she can adjust batch sizes, you can get away with it.

These leave tell tale marks on the paper. I have very little self restraint around these cookies. At first, I just pick off the little blobs that aren't attached to actual cookies; these are the stray drips, and they don't count, right? But then the sugar rush starts and soon I'm standing at a counter eating one cookie after another, until I start feeling a bit light headed. They're that good.

There was a book I read a few years ago, something about how to be a Swell Girl and one of the pieces of advice was to have a 'signature recipe' - one great thing you can make anytime. And I immediately thought of my great aunt and her cookies. These were her signature recipe. No visit with her was complete without these and when she took the train to visit us, she brought them with her. And I think she was Swell.