Shaping doughs

It's late in the evening here.  The night is dark.  The solar lights are lit in strategically placed spots in the various landscaped beds in the yard, illuminating paths and plants in the darkness.  The neighborhood is quiet.  I almost feel like doing some late-night cooking in the peace of the night.

This coming weekend, we have carrot bisque and chocolate chip cookies ready for ordering.  And the next weekend's menu has now been posted and it includes roasted tomatoes and savory egg salad.  Although it's still a little warm in the daytime, the evenings are cool enough that I'm ready for wholesome autumn foods such as these, especially the bisque and the roasted tomatoes which I think are perfect for autumn.

This past weekend I made a lot of pecan ice box cookies.  I love making these.  They are lightly sweet, full of flavor and have a wonderful texture.  But I also love the physical aspect of making the dough.  It doesn't take long to mix up, but it is the shaping afterwards that I especially love.  Once the dough is mixed, I empty it onto a tray with a raised edge and then I mold it slowly into a rough rectangle.  Then I bring out my bench scraper and, bit by bit, I start straightening the sides, packing the edges, pressing the top.  Eventually I have a block about four inches by ten inches and it's ready to go into the freezer.

That transformation from a rough pile of cookie dough into a nicely shaped rectangle is an aesthetic reward that I find quite satisfying.  I never make the top completely flat, but everything else is flat and straight (for the most part) so that the cookies, once sliced into quarter-inch-thick slices, bake into a shape that I find very pleasing.  That transformation is like sculpting, I suppose.  I'll never sculpt a piece of marble, but I'm quite happy sculpting cookie dough blocks.

This sculpting is part art and science, part whimsy and part precision.  It is creative and mechanical at once.  And it is satisfying.  Making food should be satisfying.  It's all part of the pleasure of enjoying what we eat.