“I learned to bake at Mom’s elbow in the kitchen,” says Richard Reutter of Caroline’s Cakes, a bakery in Spartanburg, South Carolina, that opened four decades ago when Reutter’s mother, Caroline, started selling caramel cake off her front porch. Today, the business is still a family affair, and though Caroline passed away in 2017, the mother-son baking bond lives on in a special Christmas cookie they call a nutty finger.
“They’re shockingly simple and incredibly delicious, and similar to a Mexican wedding cookie,” Reutter explains. “They have the somewhat salty crunch of the pecans and a shortbread-like base.” His mother always made them during the holidays—Reutter’s job as a young boy was shaping the dough into fingers—and would bring a box of them along as a hostess gift at Christmas parties.
These days, Reutter makes the cookies with his daughter, named Caroline after her grandmother. “Baking together is a way for me to tell her about the legacy her grandmother left,” Reutter says. Nutty fingers, in their simplicity, are a great starting point for a young baker, too.
To make them, simply blend all the ingredients, shape and bake the dough, and roll the finished cookies in confectioners’ sugar when they’re still just a little warm to help it stick. “There is no amount of confectioners’ sugar that is wrong—it’ll just be a little richer if you are more heavy-handed,” he says. “And you’ve earned the right to sample one during the coating process. That’s a rite of passage.”
