Take your cookie dough out of the refrigerator and use a spoon or a 2-teaspoon scooper to transfer balls of dough to your prepared cookie sheets, 12 cookies to a standard-sized cookie sheet.
Bake your Butterscotch Delight Cookies at 375 degrees F. for 10 to 14 minutes. (Mine took 12 minutes.)
When your cookies are done, take them out of the oven and place them on cold stovetop burners or wire racks. Let them cool on the cookie sheets for at least 3 minutes and then remove them to wire racks to complete cooling.
Yield: 2 and ? to 3 dozen soft, butterscotchy cookies that everyone will love.
Hannah’s 2nd Note: These cookies are good just the way they are, but if you want to decorate them a bit, mix up the Powdered Sugar Drizzle recipe and drizzle a bit over each cookie. The Powdered Sugar Drizzle recipe is given on the following page.
POWDERED SUGAR DRIZZLE
Ingredients:
1 cup powdered sugar (pack it down in the cup when you measure it)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 to 4 Tablespoons of milk (if needed for consistency)
Directions:
Place the sugar and vanilla in a bowl.
Starting with 2 Tablespoons of milk, mix everything together until it’s of the proper consistency. If it’s too thick, add more milk until it’s the consistency of a drizzle. If it’s too thin, add more powdered sugar.
Use a spoon from your silverware drawer to drizzle the mixture over your cooled cookies. You can also use a pastry bag, or you can squeeze it out through the nozzle of a squeeze bottle.
Hannah’s Note: If you’re old enough, you may remember the refillable squeeze bottles lunch counters and diners used to use for mustard and ketchup. You can buy clean, fresh squeeze bottles like that at places like Smart and Final or any cooking supply store. Then all you have to do is take off the top and cut off the tip of the nozzle to use it to drizzle the frosting over your cookies.
Chapter Two
It was a movie of the past few months of her life and Hannah didn’t want to watch it. And even though she was more than reticent, she took a seat in the empty theater and sat down. Her favorite song was playing on the soundtrack, the song she’d thought of as their song. Tears began to form in her eyes, but not enough to shed them.
They stood there on the balcony of a Las Vegas hotel, and she shivered slightly even though his arms were warm around her. It was quiet, the early silence that comes before dawn. The sunrise was coming, but the sky was dark and inky black, the black of loss, the black of supreme tragedy.
And slowly enough to be almost imperceptible, a faint hint of colors began to appear on the horizon. The sun was preparing to rise and with it would come the sorrows of the day, the day that she had promised to go to the airport with him to say goodbye.
“I love to watch the sunrise,” he said softly. “It’s like a resurrection for me. I can forget the mistakes I made in the past because everything is fresh and new again. And if I try, I have the power to make it the best day of my life.”
Hannah didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She simply turned and kissed him as the music came to a crescendo and the screen shifted to the next scene.
One more kiss and he was walking away through the checkpoint, leaving her with tears in her eyes that threatened to spill down her cheeks. She stood there, unable to force her legs to move for several minutes, and then, finally, she turned away. He was gone and she felt bereft.
Hannah sighed. She’d never felt so alone. She knew he was coming back in a week, but that didn’t really help right now. Ross was gone and she felt desolate.
“Excuse me, miss.” One of the TSA agents, the one Ross had talked to while he was waiting for his shoes and carry-on, approached her. “Please come with me.”
“Come with you . . . where?”
“To the scanner.”
“But . . . I’m not flying anywhere. I just came here to see someone . . .” Hannah paused as she spotted Ross on the other side of the scanner. “There he is, the man I brought to the airport. What’s happening?”
“It’ll be fine,” the agent said, smiling at her. “Just follow me, please.”
Ross was beckoning to her. If he wanted her to follow the TSA agent, she would. The agent led her to the scanner, and he motioned for Ross to come through. “You’d better ask her in a hurry,” he said to Ross. “Your flight leaves in ten minutes.”
Ross hurried through the scanner and folded his arms around Hannah. “I couldn’t leave without asking you,” he told her.
“Without asking me what?”
Ross took both of her hands in his and dropped to one knee. “Hannah Louise Swensen . . . will you marry me?”
“Oh!” Hannah gasped. Suddenly, her knees began to shake and then she was kneeling on the floor by Ross. His arms closed around her, his lips met hers, and Hannah knew she’d never felt so happy in her whole life.
The kiss seemed to last for eons, but then they heard the sound of applause. Hannah and Ross looked up to see a circle of TSA agents surrounding them and clapping.
The refrain of their song gained volume, and Hannah did her best to swallow the lump in her throat as the scene changed again. It was her wedding day and she was in the back of a garbage truck, stuck in the dumpster where she’d hidden from the killer who’d attempted to make her his next victim. No time to dress in her wedding gown, no time for Michelle and Andrea to do her hair, no time to pack for the Mexican Riviera cruise she’d been awarded for winning the Dessert Chef Contest.
Of course Mike had come through. He’d stopped the garbage truck, he and the driver had extricated her from the depths of the dumpster, and she’d run down the aisle of the church, decorated with butter wrappers, spaghetti sauce, and various unidentified food items clinging to her jeans and sweatshirt.
She still remembered Grandma Knudson’s comment. “That’s our Hannah,” she’d said. The congregation had laughed, Grandma Knudson had taken them down to the church basement for coffee and cookies, and Andrea, Michelle, and their mother had taken Hannah off to the parsonage to get cleaned up and ready to become Ross’s bride.
Their honeymoon had been wonderful. There were new things to see, places to visit, food to eat, and long nights of love to enjoy. Hannah remembered thinking that she’d never been so happy. But it hadn’t lasted, at least not that long.
Less than a month later, Hannah had come home from work to find Ross gone. No note, no message on her answer phone, just his missing suitcases and most of his clothes. She’d been panic-stricken. What had happened to him? Mike and Norman had calmed her down and promised to find out what had happened to Ross.
Mike, and his detectives, had done exactly that. Hannah felt tears roll down her cheeks as she remembered that awful night when Mike had told her that Ross was married, but it wasn’t to her. That Ross had gone back to his legal wife and Hannah’s wedding was a fake.