Gumdrop Cookies: or, Little drops of whimsy

I liked the recipe, but not enough to buy the knickknack.

Gumdrop Cookies 2 cups oatmeal 1 cup gumdrops, chopped small 1 cup shredded coconut 1 cup shortening 1 cup brown sugar 1 cup white sugar 1 tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda ½ tsp salt 2 eggs 1 tsp vanilla 2 cups sifted flour Heat oven to 325°. Have greased cookie sheets ready. Mix the chopped gumdrops and oatmeal, breaking up all clumps of candy that stick together. Add the coconut (there's no need to mix it in) and set aside. Cream the shortening, sugars, baking powder, soda, and salt. Beat well. Add eggs one at a time, beating each in well before adding the next. Add the vanilla with one of the eggs. Then beat until light. Mix in the flour. When the dough is mixed, add oatmeal, gumdrops, and coconut. Roll into small balls, pressing them firmly into shape. Place onto the cookie sheet about 3 or 4 inches apart. Flatten each with a fork. Bake 10 minutes, or until lightly browned on the edges. Source: anonymous recipe card

I was recently in a junk store (that's not derisive, they put the word JUNK in huge letters on the roof) because I love looking at the castoffs of consumerism. 

I find it oddly fascinating to see outdated collectibles removed from their display cases and thrown into a bin with an insulting price tag. Sometimes one finds entire binders of baseball cards, carefully tucked into those plastic sleeves by various preteen boys in bygone days, now available for the price of a candy bar. Other times it's limited-edition Bicentennial china, removed from someone's glass-front display case and stacked like unwanted dinner plates at a thrift store. Recently, we saw Beanie Babies for $3.50 each, and thought the price was a bit steep.

Note the perfectly intact, crease-free heart tags (some of which retain their aftermarket hard-plastic tag protectors). Keeping the tags intact was supposed to be crucial to preserving the Beanie Babies' value.

Junk stores are routinely full of "the plates that no one is allowed to use," which is the natural progression after people's long-grown children don't want the china that they were swatted away from all their young lives.

Christmas things inevitably take up a lot of shelf space in junk stores. It's hard to re-home one's surplus Christmas knickknacks. All of the would-be recipients already have several boxes of festive dust-collectors crammed into every spare corner of the house. All of this to say, I didn't want to pay for the novelty Christmas ornament cookie jar, but I thought the recipe that came with it looked neat.

I've seen that big Santa Claus tray (rear right) in many people's houses.

I was getting some annoyed looks from the store owners, who were mildly irked that I was photographing a lot of merchandise that I clearly had no intention of buying. However, I did get legible(ish) photograph of today's recipe.

Gumdrops in cookies! It's hard for me to talk about gumdrop cookies without using the word "whimsical" in every sentence. Anyway, since I don't do Christmas unless strictly forced, I saw no point in waiting for the holiday to make these.

I've only ever gotten gumdrops while trick-or-treating. It never occurred to me that they exist in stores where I can buy them any time of year. I wasn't prepared for a better-than-fun-size box of them to be so cheap.

That's not to say I don't like them. Gumdrops are one of my favorite Halloween candies, and I know I'm not alone. The last time some friends and I had a Halloween post-trick-or-treat candy trade, Dots were the most prized of treats. No one would part with their Dots for anything.

I had to cut up the gumdrops in secret (or at least try to). But gumdrops are surprisingly fragrant when you cut them up, which betrayed my covert candy snipping. When word got out that gumdrops were in the kitchen, everyone wanted some.  No amount of menacingly waving the scissors could keep all of the gumdrops for recipe use.

Gumdrops are also very sticky. I thought I could just jam the scissors in there and have at them as if I was snipping fresh basil, but they glued themselves to the blades. I ended up having to cut each gumdrop one at a time, unsticking each individual piece of snipped candy as I went. The gumdrops also left a surprisingly stubborn residue on the scissors that would not come off until I swirled the blades in boiling water.

The whole time I was cutting up candies, I felt like I was borrowing someone else's family's Christmas tradition. I could imagine Ma (or Grandma) having all the wee ones cut up the gumdrops for the cookies (having plenty of extras on hand so the kids can eat a "few"). It's the high-fructose corn syrup equivalent of those rustic family afternoons where everyone chats in the shade while shelling nuts for peanut brittle.

After we cut apart the gumdrops, all the pieces stuck to each other to make one big multicolored mass. I mixed them with the oats so that the oatmeal dust would coat them and make them come apart. Like breaking up a Christmas argument, this took longer than I thought.

Having gotten the title ingredient ready to bake, we could make the rest of the recipe. At this point, it briefly looks like normal, candy-free cookie dough.

We haven't seen shortening, oatmeal and coconut in a single cookie since the Bonnie Doon Oaties. For those who forgot how that recipe went, I substituted butter for shortening and the cookies turned into a hopeless runny mess. Therefore, I risked no such ingredient swaps today.

If you ignore the gumdrops, this is essentially a recipe for oatmeal cookies. And like all recipes for oatmeal cookies, the dough looked like a hopelessly small amount until we added the oatmeal. And then (as always happens with oatmeal cookies) after all was mixed, it looked like we would spend the whole night slowly getting batches in and out of the oven.

I didn't know what to expect of the gumdrops as they baked. Would they melt? Soften a bit in the oven but regain their firmness after cooling off? Would the gelatin (or whatever gum was used in these) be permanently deactivated in the heat, turning the gumdrops into multicolored spots of syrup? 

It turns out that gumdrops are as oven-resistant as the pan the cookies sat on. They refused to slump in the heat. As the cookies spread, some of the gumdrops stayed up at a jaunty angle.

As the first batch cooled and the second batch baked, we ran into one line of instruction that whoever wrote this omitted. When you're shaping your cookies into balls, you need to firmly press the dough instead of lightly rolling it. I was a lot gentler with the cookie dough for batch #2, and they were not nearly as nice-looking as the first ones.

I should note that as charming as I thought these looked (well, the first batch anyway), others were less than impressed.

Looks like someone just crossed himself off the Christmas cookie list.

I have to admit while I was excited to make the gumdrop cookies, I didn't have high hopes for eating them. I was expecting this to be one of those times when the title ingredient ruins the recipe (lest we forget the black pepper cake). However, the gumdrops were really good in these cookies. 

If you ignore the gumdrops, this is a very good oatmeal cookie recipe. However, when I proposed omitting the multicolored candies next time, I was immediately shouted down. "No! You don't get it! You HAVE to add the gumdrops! The recipe won't work without them!"

I realize this is a culturally loaded comparison, but the cookies tasted like a good fruitcake. Or at least, they taste like what I imagine a good fruitcake to be. (I would wager that gumdrops are better than the cheap candied fruit that appears in most grocery stores during fruitcake season.) And the cookies are small enough to be satisfying but not overwhelming.

One person eyed the plate with annoyance that a box of gumdrops got scissored and ruined. He also had a lot of skepticism at the whole premise of the recipe. However, after a bit of badgering, he tried one. Then without realizing it, he ate half a dozen more and did an adorably inept job of pretending he hadn't.

I tried to give some of the gumdrop cookies away. One person was going out visiting the next day, and I told him to take a heavily-loaded bag of cookies with him. However, the next day there were no cookies left for him to take. 

I also promised we would make the cookies again.