Making sugar cookies always takes me back to the summers I spent at Aunt Anna’s farm.  My Aunt had a dish cupboard with curtains for doors, and on one shelf there was drinking glasses that didn’t match.

    “What are all those different glasses for?” I can remember asking when I was about seven.

    “I make cookies with these,” she replied taking out a special blue glass she always put my buttermilk in when I visited.

    “Cookies, with those?” I pointed again, finishing my breakfast.  I couldn’t figure out how you made cookies with drinking glasses.

    “Sure, would you like to make sugar cookies today?” she asked.

    “Can we?” I was bouncing in my chair.

    “You go check the for eggs in the chicken coop, while I cleanup the breakfast dishes.”

    “Okay,” I said drinking down the rest of the buttermilk.  I was afraid of the chickens, what city girl wasn’t, but my aunt had shown me how.

    When I returned, she was drying the last of the dishes and putting them away.

    “Ready?” she asked me pulling out a cookbook.

    “Yep!” I was so excited.

    “Okay, go wash up, so we can get started,” she instructed while flipping through the pages.

    When I returned, she was sitting reading the recipe.

    “Okay, you read what I need as I put them together,” she instructed a s she got up.

    I sat down and read the recipe aloud the best I could, as she got each of the ingredients and measured them.  She pulled out a big bowl and started adding ingredients to the bowl and mixed it by hand.

    Aunt Anna, took only half the dough out of the bowl and started to roll it.  She then got one of the odd glasses, dipped the rim in flour and used it as a cookie cutter.

    “I find those boring,” she said as she moved the cut out cookie dough to the baking pan.  I was wondering if that’s all she did with the glasses, until she dipped the bottom of the glass in flour and pressed the design of the glass bottom into the cookie.  I was amazed at the pretty flower pattern the glass had left.  “Why don’t you get a couple of the other glasses,” she invited.

    I took a couple of other glasses from the special shelf, and we stamped the cookie sheet full of different snowflake and flower designs.  I couldn’t wait to make more as the cookie sheet went to the oven.

    “I have an easier way.  You want to cheat?” she asked me with a grin.

    I shook my head yes.  My aunt is a very truthful person.  I didn’t quite understand how she could cheat at anything.  I watched as she took a little dough from the bowl and rolled it into a ball about the size of a walnut and dipped a glass bottom in flour.  She then placed the ball of dough on the next cookie sheet and pressed the fancy glass bottom to the ball and squished it out leaving the design on the cookie.  “Now you do them.” she said and moved aside.

    As I rolled balls of dough and squished in the patterns of the glasses, she brought over an assortment of glasses, sugar bowls, vases and gadgets from all over the kitchen.  She even showed me how to use two types of potato masher, sides of the sugar bowls and patterns you could make with a fork.

    When we where done, the kitchen table was full of things we had to wash up and the counter where full of pretty sugar cookies.

    I’ve passed on the tradition of ‘squish cookies’, but the blue cobalt glass with buttermilk will be missed.