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Making Christmas sweeter

Robin Dreyer (left) loves making sweets for others at Christmas.

Dreyer's recipes

by Emily Born Schilling
If Robin Dreyer had her way, it would be Christmas 365 days a year.

"I love to cook for people and especially through the holidays when you can add those special touches to make a dish appealing," the Decatur County REMC member wrote us in her Cook's Profile nomination letter.

As Dreyer, who is also an avid craftsperson, put the finishing touches to the candy gift basket she'd prepared, she shared ideas for making homemade candies a bit more festive. She drizzles icing on brownies or on homemade chocolate covered pretzels. The pretzels, which she dips in a mixture of equal parts of melted almond bark and chocolate chips, also look festive with candy sprinkles covering the chocolate.

Dreyer, 43, started cooking when she was 6 years old. Her family had a 1,000 acre farm, and she helped her mom prepare meals for the hired hands. "I was used to cooking for big groups," she said.

That background helped her in her adult life. For 15 years, she ran a call-to-order bakery out of her New Point home. She decorated wedding cakes, made baked goods and did some catering. She began the business to supplement husband Gerald's income. She could do it at home while raising her sons, Roy, now 24, and William, now 22. Though she now admits, "there's no money in the bakery business," she was able to earn enough in those days to help out with the necessities.

And she garnered a lot of memories, some funny, some bittersweet. One of her funniest recollections was the day she rushed off to a graduation party with a huge cake she had baked. She had her two boys, who were then babies, in tow. Before she strapped the boys in the car, she placed the cake on the roof and asked her mother-in-law to keep an eye on the cake. "She watched the cake & Dreyer recalls, laughing, "slide off the roof of the car." But the worst part of that story was that the cake remained there, on the ground, for months after that the dogs wouldn't even eat it!

She also recalls the day she and her husband delivered one of her wedding cakes to a reception site. Dreyer always assembled and decorated her cakes on site, and after making the delivery on this particular day, she and her husband left to go to the doctor because she wasn't feeling well. They planned to return to decorate the cake afterward, but instead, she ended up in the hospital, diagnosed with Crohn's disease. Her husband and a friend had to rush back to the reception hall to assemble and decorate the cake for her. She had to close her bakery business that day because of her health.

But, Dreyer said, in cooking and in life "no matter what goes wrong, you alter it and keep right on trucking." Upon request, she still bakes cakes and other treats and also sells homemade jelly and baked goods at flea markets in the area

Dreyer also enjoys compiling cookbooks. Her first cookbook, "Generations at Grandma's Knee," features recipes, poems and anecdotes from four generations of her family. The grandmother of two (including 8-month-old James, shown above, 1-year old-Alexis and another on the way) is working on a new cookbook, "Generations at Granna's Knee," which will include recipes from her children, including daughter Katie, 15, and daughter-in-law Monica. A Christmas cookbook is also in the works, filled with recipes of just some of the sweet treats Dreyer loves to share with others.

Emily Born Schilling is editor of Electric Consumer.

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