Frost and Desolation - La Pêche Fraîche

I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.
Do you understand this feeling?
This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes.
Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even… a mouse.

Happy Christmas all!

When I first saw Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein last month, I was instantly captivated by the costume design. It was so intricate and thoughtful… Each painstaking detail felt like a perfect display of human imagination and creativity. I made a note “Mia Goth costume cookies” and kept watching. Afterwards, I researched Kate Hawley, who was the primary costume designer. She has described extensively the design and creation process that went into every garment and accessory. The behind the scenes photos of the costuming department as well as the sketches and iterative processes are incredible. The scale of the team and their effort are staggering.
(See here a little collage I made of the inspiration I used in case you haven’t seen the film.)

Other ideas blossomed upon my second watch. The theme of entomological capture is internalized and externalized throughout Elizabeth’s character development, between her moth capes, chained beetle jewelry, and butterfly cage. Similarly, the brutality and bloodshed of winter and the Arctic are echoed throughout the Creature’s story. Yet in spite of this violence, his innocent and instinctually gentle treatment of animals is utterly charming, and the cadre of little mice scampering about his gigantic figure is so, so cute. (Mary Shelley’s Creature was, in fact, a vegetarian.)

Let’s go through to translate that inspiration to confection, shall we?

First up are the vanilla bean butter cookies. Each one is inspired by a different dress of Elizabeth Harlander/Claire Frankenstein. I used the “printed” technique (see more at King Arthur) to get each of the fabric patterns. To make the red striped diamonds, I stacked up two red doughs, then carefully cut into strips and stacked further until I had a square. Each square was cut into a triangle half. Each triangle half then was swapped from another square in order to match up the stripes. The green and teal patterns were done with swirls and concentric circles. When doing the printed technique, make sure you’re really pressing/sealing the doughs together. It’s important to not be overly precious with the designs, else you risk things falling apart in the oven.

A sturdy spiced gingerbread makes up the butterfly shadow boxes. Each frame is baked, then the top decorated with royal icing. A wafer paper butterfly rests on the base. Glass made of hard ball sugar is poured into each frame before the top is affixed to the bottom. Sugar glass has a tendency to go just slightly frosted when poured on parchment, a fact that I regretted until I convinced myself that antique taxidermy ought to be a little grimy and dusty, after all.

The far and away fan favorite was the black sesame mouse sablés. These are ultra sandy, yet rich and redolent with roasted sesame. Kind of like a grown up peanut butter cookie, especially with the addition of a slightly jammy fruit leather tail. This dough is necessarily rather crumbly and dry in order to nail the texture, so shaping it requires a slight bit of patience. Warm hands help the shapes come together, too.

The iridescent scarab beetles are snappy tempered white chocolate poured into a beetle mold with a sprinkle of feuilletine (made of crêpes dentelle/gavottes) swiped with luster dust. They are simple, sweet, and milky—all the best aspects of white chocolate, without trying to be much more.

My personal favorite are the red velvet crinkle cookies, which I wanted to resemble blood in the snow. They are soft and slightly chewy, with a mild cocoa and buttermilk red velvet flavor. I roll them in granulated sugar before the confectioner’s sugar, which gives the outside a bit of crunch as well.

Et voilà! These gothic Christmas cookie boxes are complete.