Make sweet connections by exchanging baked goods

Julia Usher learned to bake cookies the old, old-fashioned way: with apron tied around her little-girl waist, with a sure-handed mama right by her side in their Connecticut farmhouse kitchen.

Together, they’d troop out to the brambles, pick the berries for the jams they’d press into their thumbprint cookies. They’d walk to the henhouse, scoop up the eggs for their rich, buttery doughs.

No wonder Usher — who grew up to get a degree in mechanical engineering from Yale University, earned an MBA from Stanford University and at 47 is an accomplished pastry chef and cookbook writer — is intent on drawing folks back to the kitchen.

And she has just the ticket to get us all baking the honest-to-goodness way, in which a recipe is passed from one baker to the next, complete with whispered kitchen secrets and pointers scribbled in the margins.

It’s the cookie swap, that ages-old tradition where you walk into someone’s kitchen with a few dozen cookies from your favorite recipe and waddle out a few hours later, your belly full, your platter now filled with dozens of everyone else’s most-loved cookies.

For Usher — who’d like to see us all swapping year-round, not merely in the month of December, when so many tins beg to be filled — it’s not about the cookies, so much as the cookie recipe.

“In my estimation, the recipe is really the motivation. That’s where the fun comes — your tips on how to make it come out right, that’s what creates that emotional connection,” says Usher, author of “Cookie Swap: Creative Treats to Share Throughout the Year,” (Gibbs Smith, $19.99).

Anyone, she says, can click around the Internet, download a recipe and not realize till the very first bite just how bad to mediocre that recipe might be.

There’s no replacing the heart-to-heart, kitchen-to-kitchen connection that comes from passing along a beloved recipe.

And if, along the way to that hand-scribbled card, you have to fill up a cookie tin with so many buttery, brand-new-to-you favorites, well, then, it’s a tough task. But you’ll take it on, won’t you?

Swap-worthy?

“A great cookie equals a textured cookie, one with layers of flavor; not sweet. If it’s just sugar for the sake of sugar, that’s not a good cookie to me,” says Usher.

A swap cookie must be transportable; it needs to get where it’s going without crumbling into bits or collapsing into a blob.

Make it pretty. If your cookie gets invited to a party, dress it up for the occasion. Let your imagination run wild.

Ready to swap?

Here’s what you should know, according to Usher, cookie swapper extraordinaire.

Remember to swap the recipe and not just the cookie — that’s where the meaning is. Ask guests to send in the recipes before the party, and make a little book, or tuck them all in a recipe box, one for each guest to carry home.

The more personal you can make the swap, the more memorable it will be. Include snapshots of your guests in the invitation, around your kitchen, or on the cookie-swap table. Write each guest’s name on the take-home container.

Send cookies home in some creative container — a vintage ornament box, an old metal lunchbox — and not just on paper plates with humdrum plastic wrap.

Be sure to display the recipe right by the cookie, so guests know the ingredients. This might even spur questions or be a great icebreaker for guests who don’t know many people at the swap.

Don’t do all the baking in one fell swoop. Remember the freezer. Usher suggests that instead of freezing baked cookies, which causes the treats to lose flavor, freeze the dough. Double-wrap each mound of cookie dough in plastic wrap, then add a layer of foil. Thaw and bake shortly before swap time.

If your friends aren’t quite ready for baking, how about an ingredient swap, where each guest is asked to bring an ingredient, and you all bake together. Veteran bakers lead the way, and the ones who claim to be all thumbs can watch and learn as they dump, stir and roll.

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