Tuesday’s Table: Mimi Barbour’s Cranberry Shortbread Cookies

Thank you so much for inviting me to be on your blog, Karyn. I’m really happy to share my story and cookie recipe with your readers.

Author of The Vicarage Bench Series, Angels with Attitude Series, and a hot, new romantic suspense series called Vegas. Mimi Barbour lives on Vancouver Island and writes her romances with tongue in cheek and a mad glint in her eye. “If I can steal a book lover’s attention away from their every-day grind, absorb them into a love story, and make them care about the ending, then I’ve done my job.”

I once won a cookie contest with my Cranberry Shortbread Cookies.

I had decided to enter into the Chatelaine contest, because my recipe had such a great history that I thought to share it with the readers. To my astonished delight, my cookies were picked, if I remember correctly, as winner #3. I still have the coffee pot, blender and various baking ware as proof.

All 10 winners were printed in the Chatelaine magazine for the entire world to see, and I’ll admit to walking around with a puffed up chest for a few days. Now that I remember, I do believe it was the first time I’d ever seen anything I wrote in print!

The story goes that as a new bride, I had moved to northern Canada, to a place called Stewart, B.C. It was within a few miles of the Alaska border so it was pretty isolated. In those days (and unfortunately still today) the best meal I could produce was a killer peanut-butter and banana sandwich. Needless to say, my husband is our chef and has been since the beginning. My little contribution to our meals is the dessert.

Understandable, as a new bride, I had very few recipes and the holiday season was approaching. So at a bingo game with some other ladies I lamented my terrible lack. An older Scottish woman, who I thought a real sweetheart, said, “Lassie, I will give you a true Scottish shortbread recipe handed down from my mother and hers before her. I’ve kept this to myself for that many years, but I like you. Since you’re a new bride, I’ll share.”

So saying, she took a napkin from the table and wrote her shortbread recipe on it. I quickly rewrote it once I got home and have used the basis of this recipe for many others

The variety that won the contest has ½ cup of dried cranberries and ½ cup of pecan pieces added.

To this day, I get so many compliments on my wonderful cookies that it truly isn’t Christmas for my family without a plateful of these decorating the table.

**A sequel to this story is that the woman’s daughter, who was a young girl back then, called me a few weeks after reading the magazine. She asked me if these were her mother’s cookies. When I said yes she laughed and told me that many years ago her mother had slowly faded with Alzheimer’s without ever having written her precious recipe down. By the time her daughter’s had realized they had no copies, she couldn’t help them. Now they were finally able to have the cookies they had grown up eating.

Contacts for Mimi:

I do enjoy meeting readers so please drop me a line at mimi@mimibarbour.com

 Amazon Page: http://amzn.to/SUv0yv

http://www.mimibarbour.com/

http://mimibarbour.blogspot.com

Twitter @mimibarbour

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10 thoughts on “Tuesday’s Table: Mimi Barbour’s Cranberry Shortbread Cookies

  1. Mimi,

    What an enchanting story. I’d love to try the recipe but need to clarify what “icing sugar” is. Is it what I call “confectioner’s sugar”?

    I wasn’t a very good cook either, when I was first married. I succeeded with some of the first recipes I tried but also suffered dismal failures. One of those involved pouring some kind of milk concoction over cheese sandwiches that had been lined up in a baking pan and baking them. Absolutely horrible! Somehow, I kept my husband and over time have become a pretty good cook, when I want to.

    Barbara Barrett

  2. Love the story and the sequel – thanks for sharing that with us. And the recipe – I, being of Scottish heritage, love shortbread cookies. Last Christmas’ rendition was a Skor Shortbread Cookie…this year may just be the Cranberry Shortbread Cookie!!!

  3. Hello ladies. Thak you so much for your very welcome comments. Yes – Icing sugar is as Karyn says – confectioners suger. I think that’s the secret that makes these cookies taste so yummy. I know I’m a day late in answering your comments and I apologize profusely. Just finished a 40,000 word book yesterday and did it in 18 days…one day late for deadline. My brain was like a limp noodle last night so.. 🙂 waited until today!

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