One cannot argue that a butter cookie, with its most humble and demure nature, is as pleasant and welcomed on the palate as nectar on the beak of a hummingbird.  Simple and sweet.  If bread is the staff of life, butter cookies make life worth living.  Early on, and long before the arrogant chocolate chip cookie entered my baking repertoire, I was taught about the quick change nature of a butter cookie.  Jelly in the center added sophistication with its fruity tang, while chocolate sprinkles widened the eyes of younger eaters.  Nuts, and a roll in powdered sugar, won them the title of Mexican wedding cookie or Russian tea cake.
Mom possessed the skill of a magician and the ingenuity of a professional pastry chef when it came to her baking, although neither were her life’s calling.  As if performing a ‘slight of hand’ trick, she transformed a mixture of butter, flour, sugar, and eggs into a menagerie of bejeweled and adorned cookies.  Many years passed before I realized that each cookie wasn’t its own recipe.  It is appropriate that mothers appear super-human to their children from time to time.  Yes?

Far and away, the most memorable of my mother’s butter cookies were the ones she enrobed in sesame seeds, a regal garment for a cookie so deserving of royalty.  As I bake a batch of these sesame seed butter cookies,  smells of nutty, buttery sweetness wafting from the oven, I am transported to the kitchen of my youth.  Blue linoleum beneath my feet, white metal cabinets line the walls. Was the stove avocado green or harvest gold?  No matter.  There was more than hearty food and tempting sweets cooked up within that space.  There were memories to last a lifetime.