The Great Cookie Mystery

With all the Southern cooking going on around our house as research for the Haunted Gift Shop series (hey, it makes a good excuse!), I am constantly picking the Official Taster's brain for ideas.  I want to know what dishes he remembers from his childhood, the things his mother, grandmother, aunts, friends, and neighbors cooked.

One evening recently, he started telling me about a cookie his Mema used to make.  He couldn't remember what she called them, but as he talked, I realized he was describing what I knew as a Russian Tea Cake.  Curious, I called on my Google-fu and started looking for recipes and history.  What I found was a basic shortbread cookie with nuts added, and many, many names.

What do YOU call these?

Online, I found Russian Tea Cakes, certainly.  I also found Southern Butterballs, Viennese Crescents (though with a variation in shape), Biscochitos,  Kourambiethes, Moldy Mice, Rohlichky, and Mexican Wedding Cookies.  At work, I offered several people samples, and asked what name they knew them by.  My boss, who grew up in Pennsylvania, called them Italian Wedding Cookies.  Another friend said they were Mexican Wedding Cakes, and a couple Mexican friends identified them as Polvorones.  Intrigued, I went back to online searches, and found Polvorones, with the speculation that the name was derived from the word "polvo," meaning dust, or powder.  Other friends called them simply Wedding Cookies.

I found versions with pecans, hazelnuts, walnuts, almonds, and poppy seeds.  Some recipes called for an egg, others did not.  There were variations with all butter, all lard, or a combination of the two.  The ratio of flour and sugar to ground nuts varied from 4:1 to 1:1.  Some had vanilla, some cinnamon, some chocolate, and one included orange zest.  Polvorones are said to date to 16th century Spain, with several regions claiming ownership, and some references claim the Spanish were introduced to them from Medieval Arab cuisine.

Of course I had to make a batch, which the Official Taster pronounced good, but not exactly the same as Mema's.  However, there are dozens of recipes for every one of the many names, so I'll keep experimenting until I find that magic combination that perfectly matches his recollection.

Making the cookies:
I started by toasting the pecans.  I have a stash of very good pecans in my freezer, thanks to the generosity of my mother- and father-in-law, who harvested them from their trees and shipped them to us.  I placed a single layer on a cookie sheet in a 350 degree oven for about five minutes, then let them cool.  This richens the flavor and helps reduce the tendency to turn into paste in the food processor.  When they were cooled, I put them in the food processor with a tablespoon or so of flour (another trick to help you get chopped, not pureed, nuts) and pulsed it until the nuts were finely chopped.

A few simple ingredients is all it takes

With the nuts ready, I measured the flour, powdered sugar,and vanilla, and softened two sticks of butter.  These are very rich, though they don't have a lot of sugar; the flavor comes from the butter and the nuts.

The butter should be at room temperature, soft enough to work.  The dough can be mixed by hand (which I did) but a stand mixer is well-suited to this dough.  If the butter isn't soft enough, give it a few seconds in the microwave.
Mix the flour, powdered sugar, nuts, and vanilla into the butter, just until it forms a ball in the bowl.  You want the dough to hold together, but don't overmix.  Refrigerate the dough for an hour or so, in order to make it easier to handle, then form it into small balls on an ungreased cookie sheet.

Cookies ready for the oven

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes.  They will be faintly golden.

After baking.  Gold, not brown

Now comes the fun part.  Let the cookies cool for a couple minutes on the baking sheet, then roll them in powdered sugar.As each cookie is rolled in the sugar, place it on a cooling rack.  The sugar will cling to the hot cookies, but it will tend to melt into them because they are still warm.  That's just fine.

You're going to get sugar on your fingers, and that's okay!

 Resist the temptation to nibble, and let the cookies cool.  Because once they are cool, you are going to give them another coat of powdered sugar.  You can also sift powdered sugar over them, but I like to roll them, making sure the entire surface of the cookie has a coating of soft white.

One tip:  If you place your cooling rack over a clean cookie sheet, you can use the powdered sugar that falls off to roll the cookies the second time.  Because there will be sugar that falls off!

After the second coat of sugar, the cookies are ready to be packed in an airtight container, and enjoyed for several days, or weeks.  As if there will be any left that long!   

With a second coat of powdered sugar. Yummy!!

The Cookies of Many Names

2 sticks butter, softened

2 cups flour

2 cups chopped nuts - your choice of pecan, walnut, almond, or hazelnut

1/2 cup powdered sugar, plus more for coating

1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Mix dry ingredients into softened butter, along with the vanilla.  Stir, or mix at low speed on stand mixer.  When the dough forms a ball in the bowl place it in the refrigerator for an hour.  The cold dough will be easier to handle.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Remove dough from refrigerator and roll into small balls, about the size of a walnut.  Place them about an inch apart on an ungreased cookie sheet, and bake for 10-12 minutes, until they turn light gold.  Remove from oven and allow to cool on the cookie sheet for a couple minutes.

While the cookies are still warm, roll them in powdered sugar, coating all sides, and place on cooling racks.  Once they have cooled completely, roll  them in powdered sugar again, and store in an airtight container.

Panhandling Part 2: Christy and Steve Discuss Murder and Mayhem On the North Florida Coast

PART 2: Real Places and Imaginary Towns

STEVE: One thing our two mystery series (The Haunted Souvenir Shop, and Panorama Beach Mysteries) have in common, other than being set in the same region of north Florida, is that they're both set in fictional cities, mine in Panorama Beach itself, and the environs of fiction Pascua County, Florida, yours in the town of Keyhole Bay, just a bit further west on the coast.

There are a lot of reasons to write a fictional place, and I wonder if the reasons we did it were the same, or very different.

For my part, I'm writing about fairly recent history, and an area with a fairly small population.  I wasn't trying to write an expose or a literal history.  My initial intent was just to see all those crazy attractions, the fake volcanoes, the concrete dinosaurs, the space-age observation towers, the amusement park midways, and create a mythology of where they came from, and where they went.  But my myth kept trending back towards the truth.  Maybe a bigger, grander, more colorful version of the truth, but real things that happened in Florida and the south back in those days, some I experienced, some I only heard about later, but all, in spirit derived from some kind of truth.

There are even times when you can be more truthful in some way, because you don't have to worry about being sued by real people.  I'm careful to remind people that while sometimes the events I write about have truth to them, the people, relationships, and circumstances are completely fictional.

So, what's your reason for creating Keyhole Bay?

CHRISTY: My reasons and experience are both the same and different.  I do agree that it's nice not to worry about being sued, especially when you have dead bodies piling up!  But I had other reasons, as well.

In many of my previous books I have used real locations, especially in my two Alias novels where I had scenes in places as remote as the Blue Desert in the Sinai, a Russian apartment building, and Deadhorse, Alaska.  My gratitude for travelers who posted reports and photos on the net is extreme.  Doing that research, however, made me realize how complicated using a real setting can be.

The Haunted Gift Shop series, along with the previous Lady Plumber series, require an intimate connection with the location.  I have to know the location of each and every business, the streets and highways, the kinds of houses and neighborhoods, the population demographics - just tons of details.  Of course, every story requires at least some of that knowledge, but these stories are very localized, and the small towns where they are set are almost another character. 

In developing the fictional city of Keyhole Bay, I have control of all those elements, but I am still constrained by the limits of probability.  For instance, I can't have snow storms, but I can have hurricanes, and summer heat.

What restrictions have you discovered in creating your fictional setting?

STEVE:  Well, I think you've hit on something when you say the location is also a character.  I feel very much that way about Panorama Beach, and I think that for a smaller locale anyway, that works better when you fictionalize the place.  With a major city like New York or Chicago or Las Vegas it's fine, because nobody knows everything about them, or expects to.  There are a million untold stories there, and even a local can easily accept that the story you're telling about the city is just one of those.  But you could study a small place like Defuniak Springs or Panama City Beach and know, if not everything, then most of the major stuff about it, and I'm sure there are people with that level of knowledge.

It's also like writing a non-fiction novel about a real person.  You never really know what their most private experiences and inner thoughts are.  You can speculate.  You can go on what they're chosen to share of themselves.  But on some level you have to speculate, just start making things up, or simply have to string the facts of their life together without really being certain how or why those things happened.  But when you make up a fictional character based on a real person, for example the character Charles Foster Kane in the movie "Citizen Kane," who is clearly based on William Randolph Hearst, then the writer can know with great precision everything about them, every secret, every private thought, every hidden failing, and act on them without hesitation.  I never have to ask myself, "was the Chief of Police in Panama City Florida in 1967 a crook or a straight-shooter?  The Chief of Police in Panorama City is a corrupt bad guy, representative of other corrupt lawmen and politicians of the period, if not in that exact place and time.

But you mentioned restrictions in making my fictional setting.  I can't think of many.  In fact, it was very liberating in many ways.  Like you said, I want to know where everything in Panorama Beach is, to the extent that the reader should eventually feel like if they were there, they could get in a car and find their way around based on my descriptions.  I have a map, which continues to be refined as I advance the series, so I can keep it all straight.

If you look at a map of the Panama City/Panama City Beach area, you'll find a lot of similarities.  But for the sake of clarity, I simplified a lot of things, cleaned up coastlines, and the big change, Panama City Beach is on a spit of land that runs from the northwest diagonally to the southeast.  Just for clarity's sake, Panorama Beach in on a spit that runs east-west, with most of the major roads running the same direction, and cross streets are mostly north-south.  It saves confusion for both me and the reader.

How about Keyhole Bay.  Do you have any kind of map?  I know you've at least worked out some of the overall geography.  And it's interesting how the central body of water evolved from the inland, almost perfectly circular lake in Defuniak Springs to the keyhole shaped bay that the town is now named after.

CHRISTY:  I do have a map, although it isn't as well-developed (or attractive) as yours.  Mine is a just a pencil sketch, and you know I'm not an artist!  More important, for my stories, is to know where all the neighboring shops and things are.  A great deal of the map is devoted to laying out the main drag of Keyhole Bay, figuring out who Glory's neighbors are.  One of the other things I spent a lot of time on was the actual layout of Glory's apartment over the store.  A lot of scenes take place there, and I needed to know where everything is in her home.  The same goes for her friends' homes, and her shop.

Moving from DeFuniak Springs was an easy decision.  I still want to use DeFuniak someday as a setting for historical fiction (back to those ladies in hats!), but I also wanted a fictional town for my series, and wanted it to be reasonably close to a larger city.  I spent a lot of time looking at the map of the panhandle before I made my decision.

And while there are lots of limitations from the setting, it does allow me the freedom to create characters-some of them quite colorful-without inviting comparison to real people.


NEXT: Christy and Steve talk about the colorful characters, and where they come from.


Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Best Devil Money Can Buy
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: A Breath Away From Dying
AMAZON - NOOK - SMASHWORDS (Also available through all major ebook outlets)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: Two Bad Days of Summer
(Print collection of both of the above, coming soon)
Panorama Beach Mysteries: The Beat of Angel's Wings
(Ebook coming soon)

Beautiful Washington, DC!

I'm home, but I'm still thinking about my trip to Malice Domestic.  The conference was wonderful, and I'll have more to say about that as time goes on. but for now I want to write a love letter to the city of Washington, DC.  I had an amazing visit to your city, and I can't wait to come back.
The last year has been tough; probably tougher on my mother than any of the rest of us.  So when I knew I was going to visit Washington, I invited her to join me.  She'd never traveled east of Chicago, and she had talked about wanting to see our nation's capital.

As luck would have it, my sister was able to go with us.  And here we are, our first day in Washington, getting ready to leave our hotel and explore the city.  If you can't guess, that's Mom on the right, and my sister Jeri on the left in the picture below.

My mom was pretty cool the whole time we were there.  We went all over the city, took the Metro to lots of places, and walked miles and miles.  There were times we moved a little slower, or stopped more often, but it was worth every pause and every stop.

Jeri tried to get us a tour of the White House, which we didn't get, but she did get us a Capitol tour through her Congresscritter.  There was so much to see, we could have spent several more hours - or days - just on the Capitol, and not have seen it all. 

What did we see?  First, we arranged a two-day pass on the Old Town Trolley, a great way to get an overview of the city.

 We started by taking Metro from our hotel is Bethesda (the site of Malice Domestic), to downtown Washington.  That first day we hadn't figured out the elevator system on Metro, and we took the scariest escalator I have ever seen.  The ride went on forever, and Jeri said she wondered if some guy in red was going to show up with a pitchfork at the bottom.





Think I'm kidding?  Here's what it looked like from the bottom.  The picture's a little shaky, probably because I was having trouble getting the whole thing in the viewfinder!  According to Wikipedia, the escalator is 475 feet long, the second longest in the Western Hemisphere.  The longest? 508 feet, near the other end of the Metro Red Line.

 Metro took us into downtown, where we walked a few blocks and found the Trolley station.  We hopped on their Green Line (apparently color-coding is big in DC) and saw the northern loop, through Georgetown, past Embassy Row, past the National Zoo, and the National Cathedral, under Dupont Circle, and back to our starting point.

More Great Moments in Detective Plumbing History!

Actor Mark Harmon on the popular CBS Series "NCIS"

Number 1 Fan Steve Here:

The other day I revealed the secret history of detectives wielding pipe wrenches.  You might think that genre (other than Georgiana Neverall) had long ago faded away.  And that's where you'd be wrong!

I bring you further pictorial evidence to the contrary. Here's actor Mark Harmon (in his role of Special Agent Gibbs) on the top-rated CBS crime series "NCIS" displaying our crime-busting tool of choice. Now, to be honest, I'm not sure if this was a current episode (I spotted this and snapped the picture back in October) or a re-run, but I'll bet if you look around Agent Gibb's house, you'll almost certainly find a pipe wrench among the boat-building tools, so we stand by our case!

Meanwhile, don't forget the new Georgia book, "Drip Dead," now in stores!

It may not be NCIS, but it's pretty popular too!  Get your copy while the getting is good!  (And drop by the hardware store and pick up a pipe-wrench too.  You know -- just for household defense and stuff!)

Great Moments in Detective Plumbing History!

Detective Comics #27, 1939, first appearance of Batman

#1 Fan (and husband) Steve here:

People seem to think that the conjunction of plumbing and detective work in Christy's Georgiana Neverall series is unusual, unprecedented, and occasionally even a little bizarre.

But Georgiana isn't the first amateur detective to wield a pipe wrench. In fact, she's part of a long and proud tradition, and we have some evidence here for you today!

The art at left is from Detective Comics #27, published in 1939, the first-ever appearance of Batman (then known as "the Bat-Man").

We'll admit that Batman has since traded his pipe-wrench in for a Bat-a-rang, but he still wears a tool-belt utility-belt.

So, Georgie is far from the first crime-solver to sling a wrench, and she may not be the last!  We'll just have to wait and see...

(Batman art via Bleedingcool.com)