On the second day of Christmas, the ED gave to me...

... "Two dozen Christmas tree cookies"...


Back in 2009 in the quest to re-work recipes into 'healthy recipes', Ben made a stack of ginger cookies to hang on the Christmas tree: angels, stars, Christmas trees, holly leaves, Santas, that kind of thing, all with satin red ribbon threaded through a hole made by a drinking straw.

He'd decided that fats could be completely eliminated from the recipe. Fats were the #1 Fear Food and Ben would go out of his way to avoid them.

The cookies smelled wonderful as they were baking. They looked divine. But, not surprisingly, they tasted terrible and were rock hard.

Back then you instantly knew when a recipe had 'gone wrong' because there would be an almighty crash in the kitchen as Ben's fist came down slap bang on the work surface followed by 'animal' howling and the sound of Ben kicking things or banging his head against the wall.

With the anorexia, everything had to be perfect. Anything that was slightly less than perfect was rejected outright with a violent ED outburst to reinforce it. Anything that was a total failure was even worse. Already by late November 2009 I'd got to the stage where I'd live in dread of anything going wrong with the evening meal I'd cooked. ED would come down on me like a tonne of bricks, punishing me for the slightest thing: too hot, too cold, too big a portion, not tasty enough, too many carbs, too much fat...

So I knew by the noisy reaction that the fat-free Christmas tree cookies weren't a big success. And while my husband and I went on to eat some lovely Christmas stuff like choc chip cookies, mince pies, etc, Ben ate nothing except his usual dried and fresh fruit - all painstakingly chopped into uniformly tiny pieces and arranged on a plate, because that's how the ED liked to do things.

The other evening Ben made this year's batch of Christmas tree cookies - this time cinnamon cookies.

The shapes were the same, the baking smell was the same and the colour was the same. But this time he made them to the proper recipe, fat and all - because that's what he always does these days.

They are the best Christmas cookies I have ever tasted and Ben agreed as he merrily tucked into the broken ones that had stuck on the baking tray.