I love looking at Christmas cookie recipes and dream of having the counter space needed to roll out sugar cookie dough. This time of year every cooking blog I follow seems to have their seasonal round-ups of the best cookies for swaps, or gifts, or tree-trimming parties. Grab yourself a nice hot cup of cocoa and I’ll share the various links and recipes I’ve been nibbling my way through.
The most dramatic holiday cookie is a zebra-striped shortbread that seems to have taken Instagram by storm.
Looking for sugar cookie ideas?
I’ve been trying to find a good one that is thick and soft. When I was a kid I found a perfect recipe in one of my mom’s cookbooks but I have been unable to find it again. She got rid of the cookbook in a move across the country and I can’t seem to remember what the name of the little cookbook was! I think it may have been some sort of community cookbook from when she and my dad lived in Kentucky. That was before I was born. My attempts to track it down have been futile.
Martha Stewart has a slideshow of the “most-pinned” Christmas Cookie Recipes over here:
Martha Stewart Christmas Cookies
There are many variations on gingerbread.
I like this one:
Honey-Spice Gingerbread Cookies
from Martha Stewart
5 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for surface and parchment
1 teaspoon baking soda
4 teaspoons ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 cup honey
1/2 cup unsulfured molasses
Fine sanding sugar
Directions
1. Whisk together flour, salt, baking soda, and spices in a large bowl. Beat together butter and granulated sugar with a mixer until pale and fluffy. Beat in eggs, 1 at a time, then honey and molasses. Reduce speed to low, and gradually add flour mixture until well combined. Divide dough into thirds, and wrap each in plastic wrap. Refrigerate until firm but still pliable, about 1 hour.
2. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Working with a third of dough at a time, roll dough out to 1/4-inch thickness on generously floured parchment. Brush off excess flour, transfer dough on parchment to a baking sheet, and freeze until firm, about 15 minutes. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters, rerolling scraps as needed. Transfer cookies to parchment-lined baking sheets, and freeze until firm, about 15 minutes. Bake until edges turn golden, about 15 minutes, rotating once and firmly rapping baking sheet halfway through baking to flatten any bubbles in cookies. Let cookies cool completely on baking sheets set on wire racks.
3. Place icing in a pastry bag fitted with a small plain round tip (Ateco #0, 1, or 2). Pipe outlines and details on cookies. Immediately sprinkle with sanding sugar, and tap off excess. Let set completely, uncovered, at room temperature, at least 4 hours or (ideally) overnight.
If you want to add international flair to your holiday cookie tray try perusing this article:
46 Cookie Recipes from All Over the World
There’s a really cool interactive map to go with that article so I recommend hopping over to check it out when you have time!
Serious Eats has a huge round-up of cookies here:
29 Christmas Cookies to Spread the Holiday Cheer
Now yesterday I decided I wanted to make shortbread in my snowflake shortbread pan:
I’ve used it a couple of times before and it makes rather large pieces of shortbread. But it works great and the shortbread comes out of the pan nice and clean with those snowflakes on the top.
I almost always use this classic recipe from NordicWare since that is the manufacturer of my pan.
Ingredients:
- 3/ 4 cup butter, at room temperature
- 1/ 2 cup powdered sugar
- 1/ 2 teaspoon vanilla
- 1 1/ 2 cups flour
Directions:
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease pan lightly.
- Cream butter until it’s light. Beat in the powdered sugar, then the vanilla. Finally, work in the flour. Knead dough on an unfloured board until smooth. Firmly press dough into pan, so that it comes up below the rope detail. Poke all of the surface with a fork, and bake for 30-35 minutes or until lightly browned. Let cool in pan for about 10 minutes. Loosen the edges with a plastic knife, and invert onto a cutting board. Cut into serving pieces while warm.
I really wanted to find a chocolate shortbread recipe so I could dust them with powdered sugar. So after a bit of searching I found this recipe:
Ingredients:
Directions:
- Preheat the oven to 300°F. For thin, crisp shortbread, grease two 8" square pans. For thicker shortbread, grease one 9" square pan.
- To avoid over-creaming, we recommend that you stir the dough by hand. In a medium-sized bowl, stir together the butter, salt, and sugar until well blended.
- Add the cocoa, vanilla, baking powder, and flour, and mix until you have a smooth, slightly stiff batter.
- Press the dough into your prepared pan(s) and prick all over with a fork. This will keep the shortbread from developing bubbles under the crust.
- Bake the shortbread in two pans for 35 to 40 minutes; the single 9" pan will take about 50 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool for 5 minutes.
- Invert the pan(s) over a clean sheet of parchment and turn out the shortbread. While still warm, cut each square into 12 pieces. Cool completely before serving.
- Yield: 12 to 24 pieces, depending on thickness
Ok, lots of cookie recipes call for room temperature butter or softened butter. I usually pull out the cold ingredients like butter, eggs, milk, etc. and let them sit on the counter while I get everything else prepped. But sometimes I need to give the butter a little “bath” to speed up the process. Here’s my trick:
Place the butter in a metal bowl.
Place the bowl in the sink over the drain to cover it.
Run warm/hot water into the sink to fill it up to about an inch around the bowl.
Let it sit. The metal conducts the heat so well the butter starts to soften and melt nicely!
I’ve seen other tricks like filling a large glass with boiling water, then dump out the water and place the glass upside down over the butter. It seems to work ok.
Then there’s grating:
Grate your cold butter on the fine shred side of your grater. This works well for buttering toast too! Grate the butter right onto the toast.
Last week SteelerGrrl told us in the comments that she was making Italian ricotta cookies.
There’s a comment HERE with more info on her lovely cookies!
There was also mention of struffoli in a comment by Getting1 so I had to go look it up:
Struffoli — a Neapolitan dish made of deep fried balls of sweet dough. The dough is used in many Italian sweet treats such as chiacchiere. For struffoli, the dough is formed in to balls about the size of marbles. Crunchy on the outside and light inside, struffoli are mixed with honey and other sweet ingredients and formed into mounds or rings. There are many different ways to flavour them, but the traditional way is to mix them in honey with diavulilli (nonpareils sprinkles), cinnamon, and bits of orange rind. Naming varies by region: in Calabria they are also known as scalilli, and in Abruzzi cicerchiata. They are often served at Christmas and are sometimes served warm.
There’s still plenty of time to get to baking some treats for Santa! What are some of your favorite holiday cookies and candy? I love hearing about family traditions and favorites from everyone. Please share your recipes with us!
Here’s our upcoming schedule:
Date
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Post #
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Diarist
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12/29
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13.22
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SteelerGrrl
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01/05
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13.23
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esquimaux
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01/12
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13.24
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OPEN
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01/19
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13.25
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OPEN
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01/26
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13.26
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OPEN
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