The Jack-o-Lantern Box
Page 18
Twyla and their mom had been in better moods all week. Doing the dishes the other night had probably done the trick. She'd already agreed to cookies, so after school, Jessy’s mom decided they could get out the kitchen version of the Jack-o-Lantern Box.
It sat on a high shelf in the corner cupboard, the one with the giant rounded canister of flour, the smaller square-edged metal boxes of regular sugar and brown sugar, and the spices. All the special stuff was there, out of easy range: the box with the cookie press that only came out for Christmas, the small plastic shakers of red and green sugar, the krumkake iron.
Her mom gave her permission to stand on the tall kitchen stool, to get to the high shelf. Jessy stood on the stool all the time, but her mom didn't know that.
First she found the small box of cupcake spears: pairs of round black cat heads, green-faced witches with tiny pointed hats, and skulls. Then she carefully extracted a shallow rectangular box with a bright paper cover, orange and black, showing a witch's silhouette flying in front of the moon, over a scene of pumpkins and corn shocks, and a black cat with its back arched.
The corners of the box were a little battered, and it had some greasy patches where cookie dough had once stuck to it. Inside it were six cookie cutters: a bat, with its wings spread wide; a fat pumpkin; a cat, tail standing straight up; a rather lumpy witch; a broom, which was always the trickiest, because it was so thin that the cookies could snap; and an owl. The owl was Jessy's favorite. Or maybe the cat, or the pumpkin.
Her mom's big cookbook, covered with a red and white checkerboard pattern, was spread open on the kitchen counter, next to the clear sheet of waxy plastic, a little bigger than a placemat, that was spread open and stained with flour, ready to roll the dough on.
A couple of old Betty Crocker cookbooks sat out on the counter, too: the kids’ cookbook that belonged to Twyla, and a cookbook especially for parties. Jessy loved to look through that one, with its line drawings of neat cartoon women in aprons, holding up measuring cups and electric mixers. The ladies in the cookbook were always entertaining guests, and serving meals with menus and courses. It could have almost been the same people from the Orange and Black Book, showing how they lived the rest of the year, when they weren't decorating for Hobgoblin Parties.
While Jessy mixed cookie dough, her mom made orange sugar, carefully dripping a splotch of red dye and one of yellow into a cup of sugar. The red was like a perfect drop of blood. But then she stirred it all up, and the vivid orange melted into the sugar. She rolled the cookie dough out into smooth patches, and Jessy attacked it with the cookie cutters, trying to fit as many cuts as she could on one piece of dough.
Some of the cut-outs they left plain, and some of them they scattered sugar on. Sometimes the sugar wasn’t colored in the lines of the dough shapes, and in the oven it would make brown, caramelly burns on the cookie sheet.
They rolled up the remaining scraps of dough and squashed them together with more from the bowl. Jessy snuck as many clumps as she dared, when her mom was busy putting a batch in the oven. The raw dough tasted even better than the cookies.
Later, Twyla stopped in and swiped a few off the cooling rack.
“Orange bats,” she said. “They match your pink spider.”
“Smart aleck.”
“I do make a fine cookie, if I say so myself,” their mom said.
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