I'll comment on the story later, I want to re-read it first because it was beautiful and enigmatic and I don't want to miss anything. This is for the kifli recipe, though. I'm making them right now! I didn't have enough butter, even though I cut the recipe in half, so I used half a cup of butter and half a cup of suet. The first tray just came out of the oven and I'm pretty sure I rolled them too thin because the dough's crumbling to bits. Also, the sugar-free strawberry preserves I found inexplicably lurking in the back of the fridge (I definitely didn't buy them!) made it taste sort of gross. So not a good test. But I've got proper blackberry preserves in this next batch, which were also too thin but taste good. The NEXT tray I'll use proper preserves and not roll them out so much, then I can take those to the New Year party! Except even with the super thin ones, I'll still only end up with about three dozen. So how does a whole batch come out to 16 dozen? What am I doing wrong! ;_;

Well written :)