Most of the Kitchen Witches I know want to help people. They want to nourish, support, and heal people with the powers of food and drink. Their spoons blessed, their vessels sacred.
Not me, though. I’m more of a Hansel and Gretel-type.
I want to eat a sonuvabitch.
A screenshot from Nick Ruyter’s TikTok, displaying his mother’s “secret family recipe” for sugar cookies.
Last week, a video started circulating on social media where Nick Ruyter, whose mother had voted for Trump, put the family’s secret sugar cookie recipe up as punishment. According to the bard, she had only given this recipe to close family and only a few of them.
I told the butter what you did…
“What an utterly average recipe,” I said to my cat as I zoomed in on the video. I’m an expert on the mediocrity of secret recipes: I read fortunes with Betty Crocker recipe cards and my father insisted the secret ingredient for his cole slaw was black pepper. “She’s never been special a day in her life,” I said as I jotted down the recipe onto an index card.
I didn’t really want to hex this woman. She was getting hexed enough as it was through internet shame. I was satisfied with that.
But I knew the ideal petty use for recipe when I saw it. The Department of Education is going to be dismantled. The Big Beautiful Bill has passed. Public radio stations are going to be shuttered. After six months of Trump fascism (rather than your average, run of the mill, American fascism), I was feeling ravenous with rage. Hexing the president as a symbol of his regime was a logical process to me.
I’ve rarely got time for acts like “Hex the Patriarchy,” because from my magical perspective, anything that broad and systemic has to be chipped away at from all sides. But hexing one guy? Admittedly, he’s one of the most protected guys out there. But still. One guy. How hard could that be?
I own a million cookie cutters but none of them are man shaped. Call it my culinary misandry – I have moons, hearts, Witch hats, and Christmas trees, but not a single gingerbread man cutter in the bunch.
I headed to my local Buy Nothing group and put the call out for a gingerbread man cookie cutter to borrow for the weekend. Within hours, someone nearby replied that they had one, and I walked over to collect.
“I need it back before December,” she told me.
“You’ll have it back on Monday,” I said, tucking it into my hoodie pocket.
Your name curdled the milk, but I sweet talked it back…
The instructions tell me to cream the cup of sugar and the half cup of butter together. After internet searching for what it technically means to “cream” something, I started charging my Black and Decker drill to use as a handmixer.
Lauren Parker’s distinctive approach for hand-mixing. [courtesy]
There’s no hex like hillbilly engineering.
Softening the butter took about a minute in the microwave. When I dumped the naked stick into the mixing bowl, I listed all of the names of the women who have accused Trump of sexual assault. When it comes to harm, it’s best to be specific, but I didn’t have time to name all of us.
I had to keep charging the hand drill, which was either due to the vast amount of financial resources and sycophantic faith Trump has protecting him, or that I have a dying battery.
Regardless, I pushed through.
The tether is the tether…
After the butter and sugar looked like the images on the baking website, I added the egg and the rest of the wet ingredients.
I thought about adding other things to make it more interesting as a cookie, but I didn’t. No almond extract, no tonka flavoring. Just my homemade vanilla and my spite.
I put the bowl in the fridge to chill for a half hour. I set the timer and rewatched the video about the recipe over and over.
“You know they are done when you wet your finger and tap under one of the cookies and it sizzles,” Nick directed.
I liked that. There was something sinister in it.
Then I put on Natalie Merchant.
I rolled out the chilled dough and traced my index finger in the shape of all of the words I associate with him and his regime. I included the names of those I could think of who helped him, of everyone I could consider responsible. This, naturally, took a very long time.
Using the cookie cutter, I cut out several shapes of little men and held them up to compare – their thickness, their wonkiness, how easy they were to get out of the cutter. Laid out on the board, they all looked like family members.
“I’m going to eat you,” I said to the little men, “and hate you so much that I’ll feel nothing.”
“Whose side are you on?” crooned Natalie.
I preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. I lined all my little men up on the sheet, and then I opened the door and set their little asses on fire.
“I hope we all live,” I said, looking through the over window. “I hope they all die.”
Frosting the cookies was a whole debate with myself. I decided all the recipes I found for homemade frosting were going to be too runny, so I bought a tub of (eight dollar) vanilla frosting to mix with the food coloring I have in my pantry. I have no idea how long it takes food coloring to go bad, but I dare not look at the date printed on the packaging. I’m pretty sure I got them from my mother in her divorce.
I got creative with the color mixing, folding in the coloring to the resistant frosting with a knife. It tasted like crisco and death. This seemed appropriate.
I stirred up a blue, an orange, and a black while playing Little Hag’s “Show Me Your Head” on a loop, chanting along as they remind me to remind rich men that they are ugly.
After the cookies cool, I started slabbing the frosting on with a chopstick, which is the closest thing I have to a precision tool for shellacking frosting. The orange hair is streaky but no matter how ugly the things look, they feel honest and true.
I sent a photo to my editor at The Wild Hunt, to whom I pitched this article, a man who knew it was coming.
Lauren Parker’s Trump hex-cookies (and some Diet Coke.) [courtesy]
“Okay, but who are you hexing with these?” he asked.
“Is it not obvious?” I replied. “Look, painting with frosting is hard.”
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s not obvious.”
“Now I’m making one of you,” I texted back.
“HEY.”
“Shouldn’t have sassed me.”
“Do you threaten all your editors this way?” he asked.
“Only the poorly behaved ones,” I replied.
(Author’s note: No editors were harmed in the making of this hex. Probably. I mean Eric does have a cold right now but I’m not taking responsibility for that.)
(Editor’s note: Thankfully I have a vast amount of financial resources and sycophantic faith to protect me.)
But it didn’t matter if my unsupportive editor didn’t know who I was hexing. I knew. My stomach knew.
I made four little Donnys to eat, because the idea of eating more bland sugar cookies than that upsets the tummy of a (redacted)-year old Witch.
Listening to Woody Guthrie sing “Tear the Fascists Down,” I chomped through those little bastards with the force of a dinosaur. I washed it all down with a sip of Donny’s blood (Diet Coke). It’s the worst Diet Coke I’ve ever had in my life. Some of the cookies, I eat the head first, some the appendages; none go unconsumed. They all fester in the pit of my belly as I brush my teeth and floss, and then wander to bed.
I dreamed of Baba Yaga.
Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to chop off your head
I returned the cookie cutter on the following Monday as promised. “I’d have brought you cookies as a thank you, but they didn’t turn out,” I told my neighbor.
“Oh, that’s okay,” my very nice neighbor said. “I wondered what they were for, though.”
I didn’t answer.
But later I told my sister. “I made four Trump cookies and I ate them, viciously.”
“Gross,” she said.
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