What happens when one sends home baked goods to a sibling who is also a chef? 

That is the question that I accidentally answered this Christmas, when I decided to send some home baked kolaches to my brother. I hadn’t ever sent them to him before, because I was of the opinion that the cookies were so easily available to him in Chicago that it would be silly to send him any. 

But it as Christmas and there were no parties due to covid. So, rather than cancel kolaches altogether this year, I decided to make a batch and send them off to my brother (and dad and one other lucky person). That would allow me to then eat some myself! 

After all, the whole reason I started making them was so that I could eat them. If I were in Chicago, then I would never have tried to bake them, because I would have just gone to the grocery store and bought them whenever I wanted them. 

The cookies themselves are not super hard to make. Involved, yes. A little complicated, but not that difficult. I hoped that the strawberry habenero jelly that I used would at least provide something a little different, a sweet heat treat. 

What I got was an immediate demand for recipe from my brother’s girlfriend. A subsequent urgent demand from my brother for the recipe. Then lots of pictures of him trying the recipe. He became (his word) obsessed. 

So while I didn’t explicitly give my brother a Christmas gift this year, I now feel like I accidentally gave him a cookie to bake. 

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