Cake Day: Cream Cheese Sandwich Cookies

I used to think I didn’t care what people thought of me.

I’m brutally honest and wildly sarcastic. I’m high-stress and low-energy. I’m acutely aware of being mildly to moderately crazy, depending on the day and my caffeine intake, and I don’t hide it from anyone. It took me a long time to really get to know myself–I spent most of my years in high school being known as “lobotomy girl” because of my penchant for drastically changing my personality every few months–but now that I do, I don’t apologize for it.

Apparently, my self-confidence doesn’t translate to French.

I moved to France for many reasons, but my main and original motivation was to learn French. I have taken every opportunity offered to me to completely immerse myself in the language. It is surprising, then, that one of the biggest things I miss from living in the States is my native language. There is an ease with English–and an ease that comes with being an American–that makes social situations with other Americans and other English-speakers easy.

I am bold in English, engaging strangers in conversation, telling people exactly what I think of them and making friends with random people in random places. In English, I’m well-read, well-traveled and well-educated. I can hold a reasonable conversation with most people concerning most topics. I am not afraid of being ignorant, as long as it doesn’t make me seem stupid, but I’ve found that admitting ignorance usually makes you look anything but stupid.

I spend a lot of time feeling stupid in France.

Ease of conversation and turn of phrase that come so easily to English are distant verbal memories as I try to remember the proper way to greet each individual: Do I use their first name? Can I use the informal tu? Are they expecting a bise, or just a handshake? If I don’t understand what has just been said, should I laugh along and hope no one notices, or is it an inside joke? If I try very hard to blend into the wallpaper, will they maybe just not notice I’ve entered the room?

I’ve become what I haven’t been in years in English: I’m shy.

Luckily, Alex’s family reminds me of the cousins and aunts and uncles who used to trickle into our open-plan kitchen/den every Sunday when I was growing up. In my family, we yell to be heard, we tell stories over one another without listening to what the other is saying. We laugh at each other, with each other, at ourselves. We make ourselves look stupid, but we don’t dwell on it, because someone else is always making themselves look even more stupid.

I first met Alex’s family as they trickled in, one by one, into my life in Paziols. In Paziols, where I had the safety net of being in the majority as an English speaker but also had the advantage of being one of the few bilinguals. I got to know his family slowly, edging my way into conversations with them, conversations that faded into the end of the summer and picked themselves up in September, in Breuillet.

Alex and I make the trek to Breuillet, his childhood home, nearly every other weekend, usually on the last train out on Saturday, sometimes on one of the trains that lazily take the hour-long journey on Sunday mornings. I usually have something left over from cake day: a few cookies, two cupcakes. Last weekend, I brought these cookies, a product of Alex’s imagination: cream cheese cookies filled with a cream cheese frosting (he was first introduced to cream cheese frosting at a recent birthday, and the combination of this and his newfound love of New York-style cheesecake means that cream cheese is a valid addition to any cake day concoction.

These cookies mark more than one milestone for me: they’re the first cookies I have ever made in my new oven without staring unblinking through the glass window in the front of the oven, waiting and hoping that I’ll catch them before they burn. They also mark the day where I finally got to the point where I could sit at the table and not be a mess of nerves trying to follow the conversation in vain. I laughed along at jokes I understood and smiled vaguely when I didn’t understand the punch line, welcoming explanations. I contributed to the conversation when it came to things I knew about, and sat back and listened when others knew more than I did. It sounds so simple, but to me it was a breakthrough: instead of worrying the entire time over whether I was reacting the proper way, I allowed myself to be myself. I became, once again, myself: honest, sarcastic, high-stress, low-energy, crazy and American.

Cream Cheese Sandwich Cookies

For the cookies:

2 cups plus 3 Tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
170 g. (6 oz.) unsalted butter, melted and slightly cooled
225 g. (8 oz.) softened cream cheese softened
1 cup Sugar-in-the-Raw
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease a baking pan. Sift the dry ingredients into a medium bowl and set aside.

Combine the butter and cream cheese with a rubber spatula until completely combined. Add the sugars and the vanilla, and combine. Add dry ingredients and stir until combined.

Use a teaspoon to form balls of dough and drop them on the baking sheets. Bake 3-5 minutes, until just browned on the bottom and the tops are set but not firm. Remove and cool completely.

For the frosting:

125 g. (4.5 oz.) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
250 g. (8.5 oz.) softened cream cheese softened
1 tsp. vanilla
several cups of confectioners sugar, to taste

Beat the butter and cream cheese together until completely combined. Add the vanilla and mix well. Add the confectioners sugar by the half cup, whipping it into the cream cheese mixture and tasting as you go. When the frosting is sweet enough, refrigerate it until you are ready to make the sandwiches.

To assemble the sandwiches, take a small spoonful of frosting and place it on one cookie. Place a similarly shaped cookie on top. (I dipped some in a simple chocolate ganache made with melted dark chocolate and cream, but this is optional.)