The Bride and The Beast Candied Bacon Salted Oatmeal Cookies

Gwendolyn Wilder loved Bernard MacCullough from afar as a girl. But when the English raid his father's Castle for harboring the Scottish pretender, the young would-be laird is killed. Or so she thought. And when a dragon comes to claim the ruined castle, the villagers send the only virgin left in Ballybliss to slake The Dragon's hunger.

The Bride and the Beast by Teresa Medeiros is one of those books that despite some issues, I really loved. It doesn't hurt that beauty and the beast is pretty much my favorite trope, or that the dialogue is witty and hilarious or that it has all the charm of old skool kidnapping romance without any of the problematic consent issues. Less good are a difficult relationship with female sexuality and a healthy helping of fat-shaming. But even those downsides are mild and ameliorated by the book's charm, fairy tale framing and 14-year-old publication date.
 
It's a fascinating book for sure. It was published in 2001 and seems to fall somewhere between the slightly uncomfortable for a contemporary reader 1990s Highland romances and today's carefully feminist historicals. There's a ton of subtext here for lovers of romance and fairy tales, some of which I agree with and some of which I don't. The heroine is pretty judgmental of her pretty, selfish, sexualized sisters. She slut-shames the youngest one for having sex outside of marriage. And the oldest, who has had several marriages, still isn't good enough because it appears that she married for material considerations rather than for love. If we forgive Gwen for her judgment, it's because her sisters are generally pretty terrible to her, which fits within the fairy tale aspect of the story.

Then there's the fact that Gwen muses fairly consistently on how sad and terrible it is that she's fat. She does get a bit of a makeover via some lovely dresses, but she never loses the weight and is even shown doing some emotional eating. It's a realistic portrayal of many women's complex relationships with their bodies. Gwen has clearly internalized a negative perception of her eating habits and fuller figure. But a lot of this bad messaging and internal script comes from her not-quite-evil, but not nice either sisters. And both her sexual desires and her shape ARE validated by the hero, which is a good thing. But the (likely unintended) message seems to be that if a man says it's okay, then it's really okay. But ONLY if a man thinks so.

In a current romance, I might have been less forgiving than I was with this one. The problem is that it's just so darn charming. The heroine is abused by herself and her sisters, but not by the hero. He wars with his desire the same as she does. And his thirst for revenge makes for a creative take on the beast archetype. The reason I mention the publication date is that in the mid-1990s I read an awful lot of romance featuring semi-barbaric Highlanders. Those heroines were generally kidnapped English mewling misses (with the requisite flashing eyes) who tame their savage beasts. And I had resigned myself to that being the narrative in this book. After all, that arc's still somewhat nostalgic fun, even if I've kinda grown out of it. But that's not what happens. Or well, it is, but it's not as heavy-handed, sexual or physical as what I remembered from this sort of story. The hero might be a beast, but he's a beast primarily concerned with the heroine's comfort, confidence and pleasure. Where he's most beastly is in his dealings with the admittedly not very likeable villagers who were complicit in his father's death. It makes for a much more subtle transformation.

The thing is, despite the issues, this book really worked for me. While some of the details weren't all I would have hoped for, my overall impression was positive. All the banter between hero and heroine and the hero and his friend is witty and clever and fast-paced. The action keeps the plot moving, but doesn't overshadow the characters' emotional journeys. It's just an interesting moment in historical romance--after pirates and barbarians and before The Dukes. If you can overlook some of its old-fashioned ideas, it's really quite a perfect historical.

I don't know how much I really need to say about these cookies. They're dense and oaty and not too sweet and full of bacon. When I posted them to Twitter, I got several requests for the recipe, which obviously didn't exist yet. And then I had to find a book for them. The book is admittedly sort of a stretch, but who cares. When the Dragon gets pissed at the villagers for sending him a virgin instead of the thousand pounds he asked for, he punishes them by sending Gwen's ridiculous list of all the food she can think of, including oatmeal.

I made these cookies one night when I was, well, craving cookies. And though I salted them, there was still something missing. Turns out that something was candied bacon.

I pretty much always bake my bacon in the oven. Weird, right? But there's no hissing, spitting bacon grease or splattered cooktop. And if I'm making it for breakfast, I can use my large skillet for pancakes or eggs instead. It just works for me. So that's what I did here, adding a little bit of maple syrup, brown sugar and cinnamon in the final few minutes.

I like cookies the size of my head (or well, my palm I suppose) so this recipe makes about a dozen and a half BIG cookies, which is good because these don't keep. I'd make them for a crowd or a potluck or some time when they'll all get eaten within a day or two. After that they'll get chewy and stale.

I suspect it won't be a problem though. They're pretty delicious.

Candied Bacon Salted Oatmeal Cookies
Makes: 18 large cookies
Time: 1 hour, 15 minutes (30 minutes hands-on time)
Difficulty: Easy

6 slices thick-cut or country bacon
1 tablespoon maple syrup
2 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon, divided
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon course sea salt
16 tablespoons butter (2 sticks), softened
1 cup light brown sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon reserved bacon grease
2 large eggs
3 cups old-fashioned rolled oats (not the quick cooking kind and DEFINITELY not instant)

1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Lay out 6 slices of bacon on a cookie tray covered in aluminum foil. Bake for 10 minutes and flip. Bake and additional 5 minutes and check for crispness.

2. In the meantime, mix 1 tablespoon of maple syrup, 2 tablespoons brown sugar and 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon in a small mixing bowl until combined. When the bacon is almost done, drain off bacon grease and reserve. Brush the mixture over one side, flip and brush over the other side. Continue to bake for 3 minutes, making sure not to scorch the sugar.

3. In a medium bowl, combine flour, baking powder, sea salt and remaining 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon.

4. In the a large bowl or the bowl of a stand mixer, combine the butter, sugar, brown sugar and 1 tablespoon of the reserved bacon grease. Add eggs one at a time, mixing to combine after each addition. Add flour mixture and and mix until almost combined. Add oats [and crumbled bacon] and mix.

5. On three cookie trays covered with parchment paper, scoop out dough into balls approximately 1 1/2 inches to 2 inches across. Refrigerate trays for 15 minutes.

6. Bake for 22-25 minutes until golden on the edges and set in the middle, rotating and switching halfway through baking. Allow to cook on trays for 10 minutes, then move to wire racks to cool completely.

7. Consume immediately. Recommend refrigeration for any leftovers to be extra cautious. These do have meat in them, after all.

[edited to add: when to add the bacon in step 4--thanks to commenter Kelly for catching that missing instruction!]

More Than A Man Gingerbread Men

I'm not a huge fan of Christmas romance in general. So it's really not surprising that my Christmas posts for the next few weeks will feature a couple historicals and, well, this. I guess it's sort of futuristic? I'd called it speculative fiction rather than sci fi though because there's no real science going on in this book. After all, I don't think anyone is necessarily working on technology to make fully formed husbands to order at all the mall: the matrimonial equivalent of Build-A-Bear. But that's just what happens at the Manporium in Elise Logan and Emily Ryan-Davis' More than a Man.

When Noelle goes to the mall to order her third husband, it's a bit of a scandal. Typically Manporium relationships are for life, but the particular traits Noelle had built into her first two husbands led to their early demises. Her trip is just one stop during a busy day of Christmas shopping though and the mall is packed with shoppers and husband-builders. So it's not that surprising when an overwrought buyer collides with Noelle, causing her to almost drop her communication device, getting her shopping list a little muddled with with her list of desirable husbandly traits. When a few weeks later Aya shows up at her door a little earlier thna expected, Noelle is thrown off balance and not just by his slightly untimely arrival.

As for Aya, well, he's just been built. He comes implanted with certain made up memories and experiences and habits, some of which Noelle requested, some of which seem unique to him. And then there are the unintentional consequences of Noelle's collision at the Manporium. Like the fact that he smells like gingerbread and has a Red Hot tongue, for starters, But it's clear from the beginning that Aya isn't some kind of pre-programmed robot who is just going to do exactly what Noelle expects and exactly what she has envisioned. Her previous Manporium experiences haven't prepared her for Aya's take-charge attitude or ability to grow and change and adapt independent of her wishes (almost like a real husband--ha!).

Though on the face of it More Than A Man is a silly romp through some kind of alternate reality where women buy self-designed husbands, It actually does have a broader point to make about how people go about selecting spouses. The Jerry Maguire ideal of "you complete me" is completely subverted here as Aya demonstrates not only what Noelle thought she wanted, but what she needs. Noelle wishes she were more of a risk-taker, for example, and she tried to build that trait into her previous husbands with disastrous results. But sex in unconventional places proves to rev her motor, not to mention the...um...tentacles. Yes, there are tentacles. This betrays an adventurous streak that she should simply have claimed for her own rather than trying to invent a man to fulfill that need vicariously.

This is an erotic romance and it's definitely on the hotter end of the erotic romance spectrum. Readers will also have to be okay with Aya's, well, unconventional appendages. They're not just there for show, after all. But in a Christmas romance marketplace that sometimes seems overrun with puppies and children and sappy scenes in front of a roaring fire (if you like that, so sorry--it just isn't my thing), the gingerbread tentacle man does put a new spin on things.

When I pulled these cookies out of the oven, I turned to my husband and said, "Hm. I knew tentacled gingerbread men would be unconventional, but I didn't expect them to look quite so distressing." He came into the kitchen and said, "Well, that's unsettling." But don't let that deter you! Actually, you totally should let that deter you. In fact, the rest of this post isn't really about tentacled gingerbread men specifically. More, the theory of tentacled gingerbread men, from creative use of cookie cutters to the tools and techniques you need for proper deployment of royal icing (along with a new recipe I found that lets you make it in the microwave!).

Obviously, no one really makes tentacled man cookie cutters. But they don't really generally make Dora the Explorer cookie cutters or rainbow-with-cloud cookie cutters or any number of other shapes that an avid cookie decorator might want to create. So by using two different cutters: a gingerbread man and an octopus, I pieced together what I needed. Just press the pieces together so they stick and paint a little water over the top. When they bake, they'll be sturdy enough. If you cover the joints with icing, no one will ever know you didn't have a tentacled man cookie cutter just lying around.

Serious cookie decorators have developed serious technique for decorating cut-out cookies. I'm really a novice at it, but I do understand the theory. It starts with three different thicknesses of royal icing. The recipe below makes a nice stiff icing perfect for piping outlines and detailed work like the mouth and pupil dots on the eyes of these cookies. You can thin it with water a half teaspoon at a time until it's thin enough for flood icing--just pipe an outline and fill with the thinned icing, being careful not to overflow the banks of the outline. For these cookies, I also used a third thickness of icing--7-second icing--which is called that because when you drip it from a spoon into a bowl, the drips disappear into the rest of the icing in about 7 seconds. It holds its shape better than flood icing without piping and enabled me to make the eyes on these cookies.

As for supplies, I use 12" piping bags fitted with #3 tips and couplers for piping. You'll want as many disposable bags, tips and couplers as you have colors. For flood icing and 7-second icing, restaurant style squeeze bottles work really well. I get mine at Walmart for around a dollar each. You'll probably also need several small bowls for mixing up colors. Speaking of colors, I use gel food coloring that you can buy at craft stores and baking supply stores, as well as online. My local shop carries Americolor so that's what I use, but if you don't do this often and just want to use grocery store colors, that's fine. I just like the gel colors because it takes less to get more vibrant colors. Finally, you'll need a few toothpicks for clearing piping tips, pushing flood icing around on the surface of the cookie and making little corrections to your icing.

So if you're ready to take your Christmas cookie decorating to the next level, that's basically what you'll need. If you're new to it, I'd recommend staying fairly simple with just three or four colors and a simple design, which you can even sketch out on paper before you start. There are lots of good tutorials online about how to decorate really beautiful cookies. My personal favorites are Sweet Sugar Belle's. She has instructions for pretty much everything you'd ever want to imagine. And her cookies are gorgeous. It's well worth a look.

There is one small place where I'm going to have to part company with the serious cookie decorators though. Their preference for making royal icing in bulk is the use of meringue powder, which you can buy at craft stores and baking supply stores. I've used it, but I never really mastered the consistency issue and so my cookies were always pitted, with brittle, unattractive, unappetizing icing. Not like these, which are clearly masterpieces.

However, I always seem to have egg whites laying around from making ice cream and various custard fillings for cakes and pies and such. So I pulled out Joy of Cooking to see if it had an egg white royal icing recipe and it did! That said, it's a teensy tiny small recipe, not nearly enough for generating multiple colors. But since the fresh egg whites and microwave instructions were such a revelation, here it is with a slightly stiffer consistency ready for piping and in a much larger quantity. I had a great deal more luck with this icing than I've ever had with meringue powder based royal icing, which made this much more fun than my previous attempts.

Plus...tentacled gingerbread men. Yum.

Microwave Royal Icing
adapted from Joy of Cooking
Makes enough to cover 4 dozen designer cookies or 2 dozen child-decorated cookies
Time: 10 minutes

5 egg whites (roughly 6.25 ounces)
3 1/4 cups powdered sugar + 4 cups powder sugar, separated
a few drops of vanilla extract (for gingerbread cookies) or almond extract (for sugar cookies), optional
food coloring, optional

1. In a large microwave-safe bowl, whisk together egg whites and 3 1/4 cups powdered sugar until combined. Microwave on high, one minute at a time, until the mixture reaches 160 degrees F on an instant read or candy thermometer. If you need to take more than one reading, wash the thermometer or dip in hot water before taking additional readings.

2. Remove from microwave and add 4 cups additional powdered sugar. With a hand mixer, beat on medium until icing is cool and holds stiff peaks. Add vanilla or almond extract as desired. Cover with plastic wrap touching the surface immediately after beating to prevent drying. Icing can be stored in a covered container for up to 3 days.

3. When ready to use, divide icing between smaller bowls and color as desired, covering when not in use as it dries quickly. Fill piping bags as needed, thinning the remaining icing for 7-second and flood icing.

A Matter of Disagreement Lavender Earl Grey Tea Cookies

Back in October during Queer Romance Month, I picked up A Matter of Disagreement by E.E. Ottoman. The premise of the book grabbed me right away: two steampunk scientists have an academic difference of opinion regarding the future of their chosen field of mechanical animation. As plots go, it's a fresh one, and the conflict between the two main characters is not trivial. In fact, they are genuinely atrocious to each other for much of the novel. It's an incredibly sexy ramp-up that left me panting for the moment when they would finally succumb to their attraction to one another, among other things.

Andrea, Lord Ashcroft de Bourbon, is a gently-born scientist who has been effectively disinherited by his family because of his insistence on an academic career. Rather than lead an idle life as a lord, he obtains grants for his research until changes in his field make acquiring funding difficult. Those changes are largely the fault of the charming, erudite Marquis de la Marche, and Andrea bitterly resents him for it. To make matters worse, one of his favorite research assistants and a gifted scientist in his own right is going to be forced to take another position outside academia if Andrea can't come up with sufficient funding. Andrea is grumpy, short, pudgy and ill-understood by just about everyone. He’s really having quite a difficult time of it at the beginning of the novel.

Gregory, the Marquis de la Marche, is Andrea's scientific rival. His wardrobe is to die for and he’s also much more conventionally handsome, confident and dashing than Andrea. Their first meeting is one of the most appealing I've read this year. Though they have corresponded forever via opposing journal articles, they don't meet in person until they encounter one another in Gregory's laboratory during a party he should have been hosting up at his house. They are immediately attracted to one another, both physically and intellectually. It isn't until late in the conversation that they discover each others' identity, and Andrea goes storming off.

Andrea and Gregory are fantastically awful to each other throughout much of the novel, making their banter incredibly quick and clever. I was reminded of Elizabeth and Darcy in their worst moments, though these two are substantially more cutting. There's something so delicious about an enemies to lovers narrative. When they finally do get together, the sex is just as explosive as you might expect from two such passionate people. It's sexy and tender and humorous, just like the rest of the book.

The world-building in this book is also unique, particularly with regard to legal, scientific, and medical details, which normally get overlooked in steampunk fiction in favor of weaponry and other engineering marvels. I did feel there were a few areas where the world-building could have been more substantial. Details of society, magic, and engineering felt sketched in at points, so I'm looking forward to future books in the series shedding more light. But the information we are given supports Gregory's personal history, especially his transition. It isn’t until midway through the novel that we learn Gregory is trans*, which has implications in their society beyond gender identity, specifically in terms of inheritance law. And when Gregory recounts his story to Andrea, it marks a turning-point in their relationship for the better.

A Matter of Disagreement is one of those brainy romance reads that I wish were more common. It's terrifically romantic, but the scientific context, family politics and unrelentingly witty dialogue made it shine. And finally, and this is odd for me because I never comment on covers, but I just love this one. Romance covers are terrible pet peeve of mine. If all of them looked like this one though, I might buy more physical books.

My holiday baking is epic. I've stopped counting how many dozens of cookies I make because last year it freaked me out. I think it was 72 dozen or maybe 84 dozen? For the math-challenged, that works out to 864 cookies. Or maybe 1,008? That sounds about right. Anyway, it's a lot of cookies. They all get eaten every year though. And not by me!

For years I have made pretty much the same basic bunch of recipes: gingerbread cookies, Mexican wedding cakes, decorated sugar cookies, jam thumbprint cookies, chocolate peppermint bark, chocolate-dipped meringues, and my favorite, Earl Grey tea cookies. And usually one or two others depending on my mood and what kind of ingredients I have left over. I've got a recipe to try this year with cardamom and crystallized ginger that sound interesting, for instance.

So this is a tried and true recipe that I fussed with just a smidge. In A Matter of Disagreement, The Marquis wears an aftershave that smells of black tea and lavender, which immediately made me think of adding lavender to these Earl Grey tea cookies. For the record, I would completely fall all over anyone who walked around smelling like black tea and lavender. I mean, holy smokes, how hot is that?

Anyway, about a week before baking, I put 2 tablespoons of culinary lavender in 2 cups of granulated sugar and shook it every day until the whole thing smelled and tasted faintly of lavender. When it was time to make the cookies, I considered straining out the flowers, but decided against it since I make these in the food processor anyway and all the lavender would get pulverized along with the loose black tea. If you're using a mixer though, you might want to remove the flowers or at least pulverize them with a spice grinder or mortar and pestle.

It's a small amount of lavender when all is said and done, about half a tablespoon, so you just get a floral hint along with the tea flavor. It makes the cookies ever-so-slightly more complex. These might seem a little different, but they're really excellent. Whenever I give these to people, they're always skeptical and it always ends up being their favorite.

In fact, you might just want to triple this recipe before you even start. I always do.

Lavender Earl Grey Tea Cookies
adapted from Real Simple Magazine
Makes: 4 dozen
Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes (Hands-on Time: 30 minute) + 1 week


1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 tablespoon culinary lavender
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2 tablespoons Earl Grey tea leaves (approximately 6 tea bags)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 teaspoon water
1 cup salted butter, softened

1. About a week before baking, add lavender to granulated sugar and mix to combine. Cover and set aside, shaking daily to redistribute the lavender.

2. Pulse together granulated sugar, Earl Grey tea leaves and salt in a food processor until tea and lavender are pulverized. Add flour and powdered sugar. Pulse briefly to combine. Add the vanilla, water and butter. Pulse together until a dough forms.

3. Divide the dough in half. Lay out two sheet of plastic wrap and roll the dough into 12" long logs. You can flatten each side for square cookies or leave round for circular cookies. Chill for a minimum of 30 minutes or as long as overnight.

4. Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Prepare two baking sheets with parchment paper. Remove dough from fridge and slice approximately 1/3 inch slices. Place on baking sheets about 2 inches apart.

5. Bake for 10-12 minutes until lightly browned. Allow to cool on sheets for 5 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Cookies last up to a week, tightly wrapped.