The truffles were not cooperating. In fact, they were downright belligerent. Instead of tidy little balls of deep, dark cocoa, butter and espresso, Allie Frei, a 6-year-old truffle maker, was holding in her palms what could only be described as ooze. Deep, dark, chocolatey ooze.
“Mommy, it’s not doing anything,” wailed Allie, whose fingers looked as if she’d dipped them in a vat of earthy primal goo. There was in fact a lump of something chocolate-colored, squat in the middle of her goo.
At best it looked like a stewed prune. A very stewed prune. At worst, well. …
It definitely did not look like the truffles you see in those fancy truffle shops. And it certainly did not look like the truffle in the picture her mother, Amy Frei (pronounced “fry”), had carefully loosed from the seams of a magazine all those months ago.
“OK, so there is an art to truffles,” muttered Frei, surrendering to the art and nearly giving up on the truffle.
See, that’s what happens when you break with tradition. And tradition is what this was all about.
When Frei was a kid, back in Crystal Lake, her mother, Martha Williams, spent evenings and weekends from September to December baking at fever pitch, filling the garage with Tupperware and tins, anything that would hold the more than 200 dozen cookies they once counted for their annual mother-daughter Christmas cookie party. It was a gathering that grew each of its 13 years, from the time Frei and her twin sister, Ann, were 7 until well into college. And, guaranteed, there were no chichi truffles on the table back then.
Bye-bye, boys
Nah, this was a party where the punch came in two flavors, green or red, with globs of lime or raspberry sherbet, drifting like lost North Atlantic icebergs on the, respectively, green or red pond. And the cookie you could always count on finding was Martha Williams’ trademark thumbprint, a buttery little number studded with candied cherries or, worse, in Frei’s estimation, blobs of pink or green icing crowned by the dreaded red candied cherry. And no matter that no one ever ate it, there was always fruitcake.
“It started as a Christmas open house in 1965,” recalls Williams, now living in Venice, Fla., and still baking, though not quite so many cookies. “We did that for two years. But what happened was, the men went in and watched football and the little boys made trouble for the little girls. So the next year we decided to do just mothers and daughters.”
Aha, now there’s a solution: Banish the boys. Find your own cookies, dudes.
Flash-forward nearly a quarter-century after the last mother-daughter cookie fete threatened to push the cars out of the Williams garage: Frei, by that time living in Evanston, has a second child, a girl named Celia. Not long after, Frei realizes that, since she’s the only one of the three Williams sisters to have any girls, she’s the one who gets to carry on the mother-daughter cookie party the Sunday before Christmas. Only she decides to wait until Allie and Celia and their sticky-fingered friends are old enough to not rub cookie crumbs into the rug and smear the walls with icing.
And so, last August, Frei, now 43, began riffling through her recipe files, tracking down all the favorites from long ago: the honey-laced cut-out cookies (the recipe comes from her grandmother who had a bakery and whose husband kept bees in Downstate Bloomington), the chocolate-chip meringues and the Mexican wedding cakes.
She enlisted her mom to once again bake the meringues. So, indeed, Williams, a retired teacher and tennis club manager, and her husband, Dave, a retired school administrator, will be rolling up I-75 from the Sunshine State with the meringues, the Candlewick punchbowl and cups that Amy always loved, and the famed thumbprint cookies. The cookies-and-punchbowl-to-go are due to arrive a day or so before the party, just in time to decorate the honey cut-outs with Frei and the girls, a tradition that never ceased, party or not.
A few daring revisions
But back to those truffles. Frei, who now lives in Wilmette, is doing a bit of a revisionist spin on her mother’s cookie party. Instead of high-octane coffee, which her mother served in a huge old stainless-steel percolator, she is serving a more refined afternoon tea–though she will be keeping the water hot in a huge old avocado-colored percolator borrowed from a friend.
Instead of plain old punch in red and green, she’s doing champagne with a raspberry plopped in each flute for the mamas, and cranberry punch for the girls.
And, in keeping with tradition, there will be an iceberg of sherbet afloat in the bowl.
That’s just about where those truffles come in, although based on the struggles in the kitchen, they’ll be lucky if they’re invited back next year.
For you see, Frei and her girls plan on doing this at least until the girls head off to college. Which, come to think of it, means they have plenty of time to triumph over the truffles.
