Food for Thought
Heather Atwood
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The sugary smells of freshly baked cookies and the crack of the bat — in baking and in baseball there's not much to frown about. So, Deb Kaneb of Manchester couldn't fail when she mixed together these two personal passions to create "Batter Up Bakery," an online cookie cottage industry. In Kaneb's case, we could call it a big, old, yellow house industry, as she lives — and bakes her cookies — in a buttercup-yellow home with a big swing set in the yard and a mudroom full of coats and boots, the imprints of her four children, on the way to Singing Beach.
Petite, almost sparrow-like with short blond hair, Kaneb has an intelligent calm about her that seems to come from someone who takes a subject and knows how to be its best student. Indeed, she graduated phi beta kappa from St. Lawrence University, went on to B.C. Law School, where she was on the Law Review, and then worked for the Federal General Services Administration, until deciding that raising four children was the full-time job for her.
There is baking in her genes: an Austrian grandmother who piloted Kaneb's interest in the beautiful Viennese pastries when she traveled there, and a Polish grandmother who Kaneb remembers making pie doughs and homemade noodles on a huge wooden board. But Kaneb's mother insists she had little interest in baking when she was young, so it seems as if the genes knocked on her shoulder and reminded her they were there only when her law career was put on pause. Kaneb found herself cheerfully volunteering to bake for school events. When her husband taught Social Studies to middle-schoolers, she eagerly baked two hundred cookies for the students at the end of each term. At the same time this true Yankees fan from upstate New York must have been secreted away to a motel room and de-programmed, because as a resident of Manchester she had become a Red Sox fan. (Who knew that was even possible?) These were the forces inspiring Batter Up Bakery, which Kaneb started after employing her legal research acumen and researching the local Board of Health's requirements for running a home baking business, in 2005.
Batter Up Bakery offers a cookie of the month. Favorites are macaroons, chocolate chip and peppermint, but Kaneb's butter cookies are the most popular, and make winning favors for weddings, showers, and birthdays. Her signature is a jaunty starfish. Next month some lucky boy with a James Bond-themed bar mitzvah will have cookies decorated as a complete deck of cards.
In the cookie world, clever is usually a recipe for tasteless and bland, but, of all the neatly arranged cookbooks lining her shelves, Kaneb's favorite is Julia Child's "The Way To Cook." Kaneb worships Julia, and knows she wouldn't suffer a board-like butter cookie, however cute. Kaneb claims taste is always her first priority. The cookies are all baked in small batches with King Arthur unbleached flour, Guittard chocolate chips, Mediterranean sea salt, all natural dried fruits, grade AA butter, and certified humanely treated cage-free eggs.
Kaneb's baseball cookies are probably some of the cutest you've ever seen, so simple and iconic you can't imagine why you haven't made them yourself: a butter cookie rolled out and cut into circle, painted with white royal icing, two arcs of red drawn on to make the baseball seams, and then hatch marks added for stitching. This frosted emblem instantly evokes all the happy innocence of baseball and cookies. It just makes you smile.
Then there's the cutter Kaneb owns that produces a cookie shaped like a shirt. With white royal icing and red stripes artfully drawn, "Red Sox" scribed across the chest, these cookies lined up on a plate make the sweetest starting lineup of the season.
Next week is Boston Bakes for Breast Cancer, in which participating bakeries and restaurants dedicate 100 percent of the proceeds from specified desserts to breast cancer research and care at The Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Batter Up Bakery will donate all of the profits from its various macaroons to this important cause, a very good reason to order cookies and invite your friends to tea.
Batter Up Bakery cannot divulge its operative recipes, but we've included one from Deb Kaneb's kitchen which she describes as "super yummy and easy!"
Food for Thought runs weekly in the Taste of the Times section and is written by Heather Atwood, an author and mother from Rockport. Questions and comments can be sent to Heather at heatheraa@aol.com., and the food videos can be seen at gloucestertimes.com/food.
Deb Kaneb's Oatmeal Raspberry Bars
Crumb Mixture
21/2 cups unbleached flour
21/2 cups quick cooking oats
1 cup sugar
11/2 cups melted butter
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
Filling
1 cup raspberry jam
1/3 cup sweetened shredded coconut
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine crumb mixture ingredients on low until crumbly. Reserve half of mixture. Press other half into 9 x 13 inch pan. Spread jam to within a half inch of edge. Sprinkle reserved crumb mixture over jam, then top with coconut. Bake until lightly browned (about 25 minutes).
