Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder

by Joanne Fluke

  “Wouldn’t that be golden instead of brown?” Candy quipped, remembering how her mother had described the cake they’d left in the oven too long.

  Hannah laughed and turned to Lisa. “She’s a natural. She’s already read the baker’s excuse book.”

  Candy finished the last sheet of cookies and slipped them into the oven. They were flavored with almond and her mother would have loved them. There was a bakery only three blocks from their house and she used to walk down there every Saturday morning and buy Mom a chocolate-covered stick of marzipan.

  Tears sprang to Candy’s eyes. She really missed her mother. To keep from thinking about her too much, she concentrated on the cookies baking in the oven.

  “You don’t have to watch them every second,” Lisa told her. “You set the timer, didn’t you?”

  “Sure, I did. For nine minutes. And I wasn’t really watching the cookies.” Candy blinked the moisture from her eyes and turned to face Lisa. “Do you want another candy recipe? I just remembered one.”

  “You memorized recipes?”

  Candy nodded. “I’ve got one of those weird memories. I can see the recipe in my mind and all I have to do is read it out loud. I forget what it’s called.”

  “Photographic memory,” Hannah supplied the term. She was standing at the counter, her back to Candy and Lisa, crushing peppermint candy for the topping on the Candy Cane Cookies. “It’s like your mind takes a picture with a camera. There are times I wish that I had a photographic memory, but I understand there’s a drawback.”

  “What’s that?” Candy asked.

  “Photographic memories aren’t very selective. Memorizing recipes is a skill that could come in really handy, but I’ll bet you find yourself memorizing a lot of useless things, too.”

  “You’re right!” Candy said with a giggle. “I still remember the license plate on our old van. It was personalized and it said, critters. Mom got it for Dad when he opened the clinic.”

  Lisa laughed. “That’s cute. How about your driver’s license number? Did you memorize that?”

  “I don’t have…” Candy stopped in mid-sentence. She’d told Hannah that she was twenty and that meant she should have a driver’s license. “I don’t have that one memorized. I can name all the books of the Bible in order, though. I memorized them right before we went to visit Grandpa Samuel. He’s a Methodist minister.”

  “I’ll bet he was impressed,” Hannah said, turning to smile at her.

  Candy nodded. “So was Mom. And after that, she used to ask me to memorize things for her.”

  “What things?”

  “The grocery list when we went to the store. That was just in case she forgot it. And Dad’s number at the clinic. She could never remember it. I tried to teach her, you know? I told her it was all ones, fours, and eights. I mean, how hard is eight-one-four, eight-four-four-one? But she kept getting it mixed up.”

  Candy stopped speaking and frowned slightly. It was time to change the subject. She was talking too much about herself and she didn’t want Hannah or Lisa to guess where she came from. “When we’re through with the cookies, do you want me to make you a chocolate pecan roll? You could sell it in slices.”

  “That sounds fabulous,” Lisa said. “How about it, Hannah?”

  “Absolutely. If there’s anything you need that we don’t have, I’ll give you some money and you can run down to the Red Owl.”

  Candy thought about that for a minute and then she shook her head. She’d taken a good look at the contents of Hannah’s pantry the first night she’d stayed in The Cookie Jar, and she’d spotted almost everything she needed. “Do you have butter?”

  “We’ve always got butter,” Hannah told her. “My Grandma Ingrid used to always say that there’s nothing that doesn’t taste better with more cream, more sugar, and more butter.”

  Candy laughed. It was a funny line and she had to remember it so she could use it on Mom. But she wouldn’t see Mom again, at least not for a very long time.

  “Anything else?” Lisa prompted her, and Candy was glad. She was getting sad again, thinking about Mom and home.

  “Chocolate in squares, the kind that’s wrapped in white paper. I need two of them.”

  “Unsweetened, semi-sweet, or German’s?” Hannah gave her three choices.

  For a second, Candy was stymied. She hadn’t known there was more than one kind of chocolate that was wrapped in white paper. The one she needed smelled good and tasted awful, but they might not know that. “Just a second, and I’ll tell you what the package says,” she said.

  Candy shut her eyes and thought about the package they kept in the cupboard at home. “It comes in an orange and brown box and it says Baker’s in big yellow letters. And there’s a picture of a lady in an apron right before the name. That’s at the top on the brown part. And then on the orange part it says, Unsweetened Baking Chocolate Squares.” Candy opened her eyes and blinked.

  “You were visualizing it, right?” Hannah asked.

  “Right. Do you have it?”

  “Yes, we do. Anything else?”

  “Just stuff you already have. Do you want me to write out the recipe to make sure?”

  “Good idea,” Hannah said, handing her a pen and one of the notebooks that secretaries used to carry in the old black-and-white movies Mom and Dad used to watch. “It never hurts to double-check. If we like it, I’ll add it to our recipe file. Put your name on top so we can give you credit if we use it in the shop.”

  Candy took the notebook and began to write, feeling a bit like an old-fashioned secretary taking a letter in shorthand for her boss. Once she’d finished, she put her first name at the top of the page, just like they’d done in English class, and sheer force of habit almost caused her pen to keep going. She caught herself just in time and drew a little doodle instead.

  CANDY CANE COOKIES

  Preheat oven to 375 degrees F., rack in the middle position.

  THE TOPPING:

  ½ cup hard peppermint candy, crushed***

  ½ cup white (granulated) sugar

  THE COOKIE DOUGH:

  1 cup softened butter (2 sticks, ½ pound)

  1 cup powdered (confectioner’s) sugar

  1 beaten egg (just mix it up in a cup with a fork)

  1 teaspoon salt

  1 ½ teaspoons almond extract

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

  2 ½ cups flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it)

  ½ teaspoon red food coloring

  Hannah’s 1st Note: Lisa and I prefer to use the big round peppermint candies that practically melt in your mouth because they’re a lot easier to crush.

  To make the topping, place the peppermint candies in a sturdy plastic bag and crush them with a rolling pin, or a mallet. You’ll need ½ cup to top your cookies.

  In a small bowl, mix the ½ cup crushed peppermint candies with the ½ cup white sugar. Set the bowl aside for now.

  To make the dough, you’ll need two bowls, a small and a medium-sized.

  In the medium-sized bowl, combine the softened butter, powdered sugar, beaten egg, salt, and extracts. Stir until they’re well combined. Then add the flour in half-cup increments, stirring after each addition.

  Round up the dough and divide it in half. Put one half in the small bowl and cover it with plastic wrap so it won’t dry out. This will be the white part of your Candy Cane Cookies.

  Blend the red food coloring into the other half (the dough in the medium-sized bowl.) Mix it until it’s a uniform color. This will be the red part of your Candy Cane Cookies.

  Lightly flour a breadboard or rectangular cutting board and place it on your counter. You’ll use this surface to roll the dough.

  Remove a teaspoon of white dough from the small bowl and roll it into a four-inch-long roll by pushing it back and forth with the palms of your impeccably clean hands.

  Remove a teaspoon of red dough from the bowl and form a similar four-inch-long roll.

  Place the two ro
lls side by side on the board, hold them together, and twist them like a rope so that the resulting cookie resembles a candy cane. Pinch the ends together slightly so they won’t separate.

  Place the cookie on an UNGREASED standard-size cookie sheet and bend down the top to make a crook. You should be able to get four Candy Cane Cookies in a row and three rows to a cookie sheet.

  Hannah’s 2nd Note: The first time we made these, we rolled out a dozen white parts first and then we rolled out a dozen red parts. Our dough got too dry sitting on the board and the red and white twists we formed came apart. Now we shape these cookies one at a time and keep the dough bowls covered with plastic wrap when we’re not rolling. I’d really recommend forming these cookies one at a time.

  Once you’ve completed twelve cookies, cover your bowls of dough with plastic wrap. You don’t want them to dry out between batches.

  Before you put your first pan of cookies in the oven to bake, spread out a length of foil and place a wire rack on top of it. This will hold your hot cookies when you decorate them with the peppermint candy and sugar topping. Once the cookies are completely cool, they can be transferred to a foil-lined box or a platter and you can round up any topping that’s fallen through the rack to use again.

  Bake your cookies at 375 degrees F. for 9 minutes. (They should be just beginning to turn golden when you remove them from the oven.)

  Immediately remove the cookies from the baking sheet and place them on the wire rack. Sprinkle them with the mixture of candy and sugar while they are still very hot.

  Continue to roll, shape, bake, and top your cookies until you run out of dough.

  Yield: Approximately 4 dozen cookies, depending on cookie size.

  CHOCOLATE PECAN ROLL

  Hannah’s 1st Note: You don’t need a candy thermometer to make this candy.

  14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk (NOT evaporated milk)

  2 one-ounce squares of unsweetened chocolate (I used Baker’s)

  2 ½ cups semi-sweet chocolate chips (15 ounces)

  1 teaspoon butter

  1 teaspoon vanilla extract ***

  pinch of salt

  8-ounce package dried apricots (or pineapple, or cherries, or whatever)

  1 ½ cups roughly chopped pecans (measure after chopping)

  Hannah’s 2nd Note: You don’t absolutely positively have to use unsweetened chocolate squares. If you don’t have them on hand, just use three cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of 2 ½ cups and it’ll work out just fine.

  Chop the dried fruit into pea-sized pieces. Then chop the pecans and measure out one and a half cups. (This is easy to do if you have a food processor, but a knife and chopping board will work also.)

  Chop the squares of unsweetened chocolate into chip-sized pieces. (They’ll melt faster that way.) Empty the can of sweetened condensed milk into a 2-quart saucepan. Add the unsweetened chocolate pieces and the semi-sweet chocolate chips.

  Stir the mixture over low heat until the chocolate has melted. Give a final stir and take the pan from the heat.

  Mix in the butter, flavor extract, salt, and the dried fruit. (Don’t add the nuts yet—they’re for later when you make the rolls.)

  Put the saucepan in the refrigerator and chill the candy for 30 to 40 minutes.

  Take the pan out of the refrigerator and divide the candy in half. Place each half on a two-foot-long piece of waxed paper.

  Shape each half into a roll that’s approximately a foot and a half long and about 1½ inches in diameter.

  Roll the candy logs in the chopped nuts, coating them as evenly as you can. Press the nuts in slightly so they’ll stick to the outside of the roll.

  Roll the finished logs in clean waxed paper, twist the ends closed, and place them in the refrigerator for at least two hours to harden.

  Cut the candy rolls into half-inch slices with a sharp knife.

  Yield: Makes about 48 slices of delicious candy.

  Chapter Seven

  “Good-bye, Aunt Hannah. See you later!” Tracey gave her a kiss that landed on her chin, and then she ran over to hug Lisa. Once that was done, she gave a little wave in Candy’s direction. “’Bye, Candy. It was nice meeting you.”

  “Nice meeting you, too,” Candy said, giving Tracey a friendly smile. “Sorry about that fraction thing.”

  “That’s okay. You didn’t know. And I didn’t know either!”

  Both Candy and Tracey laughed at that, and Hannah watched her niece as she went out the back door with Janice Cox, her preschool teacher. Janice had come in to pick up some cookies she’d ordered, and she’d offered to give Tracey a ride to Kiddie Korner.

  “Come on, Candy. You can help me set up the tables,” Lisa said, herding the young teenager, who claimed to be twenty, into the coffee shop. “Once that’s done, we’ll open and I’ll teach you how to go around with the coffee.”

  Once they’d left, Hannah reached for the steno pad that contained the information she’d gathered about Candy, and took out her pen to make another entry. Only child? she wrote. It was clear that Candy hadn’t had much experience with preschoolers. When Tracey had offered to help Candy mix up the dough for the Chocolate Mint Softies they were serving for the Lake Eden Quilting Club’s Christmas party, Candy had handed her the recipe and asked her to measure the brown sugar.

  If Hannah had heard the exchange, she would have told Tracey how much was called for in the recipe and given her the correct measuring cup. Her niece knew how to measure brown sugar. She’d helped Hannah and Lisa bake before. She could even identify the line that called for brown sugar in the list of ingredients because she could read the words brown and sugar. But the Chocolate Mint Softies called for two-thirds of a cup of brown sugar. And while Tracey knew her whole numbers up to twenty, she didn’t know her fractions yet. If Candy’d had a little sister or brother, or if she’d spent time with kids Tracey’s age, she would have known that most five-year-olds couldn’t even read yet, and it would be several more years before they understood fractions.

  Once she’d stuffed the list of clues to Candy’s identity back in the bottom of her purse, Hannah began to fill the display jars. She’d just finished helping Lisa and Candy carry them out into the coffee shop when Andrea came in the back door.

  “Well?” Andrea asked, breezing in without knocking. She shut the door, took several steps forward, and turned around smoothly like a model. “What do you think?”

  “Gorgeous,” Hannah replied. Her comment referred to her sister’s hairstyle, an elaborate twist with feathered curls softly framing her face, and also to her outfit. Andrea was wearing a bright coral wool suit with fur around the collar. It was a color that Hannah would wear only if she wanted to help Jon Walker, the owner of the Lake Eden Neighborhood Pharmacy, sell his entire stock of sunglasses. Redheads couldn’t wear coral. It was a law. Or if it wasn’t a law, it should be.

  “I think the butterscotch is good, don’t you?”

  For a moment Hannah thought her sister was referring to the batch of cookies she’d taken to Bill and Mike at the sheriff’s station. Then she noticed that Andrea was holding out one foot to show off her high-heeled boots that were made from butterscotch-colored leather.

  “Very nice,” Hannah said, wondering how Andrea could possibly walk in heels that high. “I hope you’re not showing a farm.”

  “I’m not, but why?”

  “Those heels are pretty high for the country, especially if you have to walk up banks of snow.”

  “High heels are better than flat heels. I can dig in with these and I don’t slip.”

  Hannah’s mind flashed back to a documentary she’d seen about mountain climbing and the pitons they used as footholds to scale steep slopes. She could visualize her sister in the Himalayas, digging in with her heels and walking right up to the top of the mountain, passing veteran climbers and their Sherpas alike.

  “Why are you smiling like that?”

  Hannah knew Andrea wouldn’t think her mental image was fu
nny, so she made up something on the spot. “I couldn’t even walk in those things, much less climb snow banks.”

  “I know you couldn’t. You never bothered to practice. Remember how I used to walk up and down on the living room rug in my heels?”

  Hannah remembered, and the memory brought on another smile. Andrea had clocked miles on their lime-green living room carpet wearing heels and whatever old clothes she’d put on after school. Sometimes it was jeans and high heels. In the summer, it was shorts and high heels. Occasionally it was pajamas and high heels.