Birth Of a Coffee Hour

Big cups and big dreams in the back of St. Louis Church

Photo by River Fx on Unsplash

Leave it to me to rekindle my joy in baking right as Lent begins.

I do not eat sugar at the moment. I have not in two years. However St. Louis Church, where I have been singing in the choir, they started a monthly coffee hour. Last Sunday was the second one. And I made cookies!

It was an exciting adventure from Day 1, which was Saturday.

Having no actual white sugar in the house, I went with a recipe for Molasses Crisps Cockaigne, out of the Joy of Cooking. That is a strange name! The gist of it is, the Rombauers who wrote “The Joy of Cooking,” they named their house Cockaigne.

What drew me to this recipe was that it called mostly for molasses. There was also a quarter cup of sugar, but that was a negligible amount, and I thought, no harm if I leave it out.

Here is the recipe! My mother penciled it all up. My mom and I have that in common, a love of marking up our cookbooks.

These are refrigerator cookies, meaning you roll the dough into a log, stick it in the fridge, and slice the roll and bake the cookies the next day.

Sunday morning I got out of bed thinking: It is slice and bake day!

And I did that. Of course nothing is easy. The roll was not evenly circle-shaped — only after baking a tray of them could I correct that. The dough was softer and I could roll it back and forth so it got a circular shape.

Also, the slices were supposed to be “translucent” so 20 minutes before I was supposed to leave for church, there I was, patting the dough into shape as “Joy” directed you to. Cookies are never easy, you know? They are labors of love.

I shook some powdered sugar on the cookies to make up for the quarter cup of white sugar I had not had for the recipe.

Then I got worried.

I worried the baking powder had left clumps. What if someone bit into one of those clumps? It would be bitter.

What did the cookies taste like, anyway? I could not try them before Mass. I worried if I had just a tiny bit of sugar, I would be hungry by the time Mass even got under way. That happened to me once at the Latin Mass. At 8:45 a.m., 15 minutes before the opening hymn, my stomach started growling. What in the world, I thought. Then I realized the culprit — the Brussels sprouts I had eaten the night before.

Brussels sprouts have 11 grams of carbs per cup!

Who knew?

I know that relatively speaking they are low-carb. But I am just saying, it was enough to make me hungry.

So I could not try these cookies. I almost left them home. I just had not baked in so long. But then my brother George showed up and the exact same time, my friend Daniella showed up to pick me up for church. We were all standing in the driveway at the same time, and it ended up George tried the cookies and liked them, and asked me what was wrong with me that I was hesitating to bring them. And so I wrapped them up and away we went.

Maybe I should bake more often.

You think??

Daniella is from Paris, as I may have mentioned. She has a beautiful way of saying “St. Louis.” She says something like “Sah’ Loo-EE.” Being from Paris she did the perfect thing and made some kind of Parisian coconut cookies….

… that everyone loved. The Parisian goodies are in the black bowl and to the right you may glimpse my cookies.

All the cookies went! We were both high on ourselves afterwards.

The fledgling St. Louis coffee hour is darling. They set it up in the back of the church. Which is a genius move! If you set it up in the social hall, that is separate from the church, and you lose a lot of people.

The coffee comes from Tim Horton’s.

That is so Buffalo! Last month, the first coffee hour they had, they had simply Tim Horton’s coffee, and Timbits. That was it! Beautiful and simple. And they poured you huge cups of coffee! Not little Dixie cups. Giant cups. I loved that!

This time around, a bunch of people baked things so we had a little buffet.

I took this picture after most of the revelers had left. We really did have a nice little crowd! Most of the people in this picture are in the choir. Everyone behind the buffet is. It took me until now to catch on that the choir basically runs the coffee hour. We are the bakers and the buyers and the greeters. We come down from the choir loft and do it.

The remains of the day.

I am excited to help get this new coffee hour going. It is like opening a new online shop. Starting a new sketchbook. Dreaming up a new writing project.

I have had so much fun helping with the Latin Mass coffee hour. All the cakes I baked!

I have a million pictures just like that one. The loaves of bread … the pans of cornbread … the Crock Pots of chili! Anyway, we have seen that grow from a couple dozen people to well over a hundred. And this new one, I can see, has potential.

I was looking around St. Louis thinking: I am sure I can figure out how to plug in a couple of Crock Pots.

We’re starting small, in the back of this huge church.

But we have big dreams!