Nothing says summer like Danish butter cookies. That might sound counter intuitive, and it is. But it’s not my fault I find myself a Scandinavian awkwardly positioned on the side of the world, where Christmas is in summer. I was raised to eat butter cookies at Christmas, and Christmas is in summer, and that’s just the way it is.
They’re actually pretty difficult to make here in the Queensland summer. The mix doesn’t get the right consistency – it needs cold, really – but it still works. It just comes out differently, and there’s something kind of charming about that. One year I even baked a tray of them on the bonnet of the car. They were a bit dry on the outside and soggy in the middle, but when in Rome… or, you know, Bundaberg.
There are lots of benefits to this climate, if you ask me, not least the fact that there’s plenty of sunlight. You’d think there’d be more innovation in commercial solar solutions than there actually is, but at least the opportunity is there. The things we’d do in Denmark if we had this weather… let’s just say it’d be a bit more impactful than vehicular baking.
A guy over the road was telling me that the boutique baking sugar business he works for is looking into 100kW solar system design, but he suspects it’s all a bit of hot air to distract certain stakeholders from the fact that the owner has just acquired a mining company. I don’t know how such a plan would work, honestly. In Denmark, waving around a green flag would lead to closer scrutiny, but here, many people seem to take it at face value.
It’s the same with my butter cookies. People are like, wow, great biscuits, Eric. They call them bickies here. But they don’t bother to inquire as to what they’re actually supposed to taste like. They fail to realise that the texture is all wrong, and that they’re seasonally inappropriate.