Holiday Cookies: Old Standards and New Hits
December 19, 2011
This year will be my 5th Annual Holiday Cookie Extravaganza. We make the treats, we package them all pretty, and then we drink wine, eat soup and chex mix, and take home a nice big bag of baked love. The kids decorate gingerbread people, and get too close to the tree. It’s a sparkly, twinkly, cheery way to welcome the holidays and I’m ever so grateful for the friends that keep coming back. Here’s a few of the greatest cookie hits. Happy baking!
Tangerine and thyme chocolate chip cookies
These yums from the LA Times sound weird, but they are actually really lovely. The thyme gives them a bit of grown-up attitude, and the tangerine (or orange) puts everyone in a good mood. Plus chocolate. Even better mood.
Shortbread
My dear friend Hilary abandoned me and moved far, far away, but I still have the baking to remember her by, and the great cocktail parties. Sigh. People shouldn’t move. This is her family’s recipe and it will positively snow any shortbread you’ve eaten before. When she brought them to the cookie exchange, they were dipped in chocolate – delicious, but optional.
1 lb butter at room temperature
1 cup icing sugar
3.5 cups flour
Place all the ingredients in a bowl. Cut with pastry cutter until it resembles a fine meal. Take half (or a third) into clean hands, working and mooshing it together until it is like dough. Form into a log on wax paper and refrigerate until cool. Cut and bake at 350 until the edges brown, about 10 mins.
Here at the ranch, and by ranch I mean apartment in an urban area, we call these Sausalito cookies, because they remind us of the big Pepperidge Farm cookies of the same name. These glorious disks from Martha, however, are loaded with more stuff (cherries, toffee), taste better and are 4 quillion dollars cheaper. They also have that great plate o’ cookies vibe. Big and stacked and ready to be dunked.
My friend Joanne is one of those people that could make the entire First Family out of gum paste, whilst also having gorgeous hair. She’s attended every cookie exchange and always brings something fabulous, but these meringues were my favorite. She didn’t include the nuts, which is fine with me. I loved the chewy, candy-like texture of the meringue with the bursts of chocolate. Surprising and addictive. These take 5 hours to bake, so plan accordingly.
Chocolate thumbprints with chocolate and vanilla bean ganache and key lime thumbprints
Again, from the semi-divine Martha, these chocolate thumbprints are truly divine. They are melt in your mouth moist, not too sweet, and the ganache is perfectly smooth and tangy. They also look beautiful, even if they are a bit of a pain to make. Forming the cookie so it’s the right size to accept the thumbprint (actually the stick-end of a wooden spoon), is tricky. They crack and end up off-center, but once you put the ganache in and they set up, it doesn’t matter. It’s cookie magic. I’m including the key lime thumbprints, because, like their chocolate counterparts the texture of the cookie is heavenly. The only caveat is that, despite the pleasant creaminess of the filling, it’s not limey enough. In happy news, they are much easier to form, because the dough is softer.
Biscotti is both easy and hard to make. It’s not complicated, but there are a lot of steps. The good news is that even if your shape is off, the taste is the same. These morsels from Giada are delicious, with that winter citrus zing I love, and they look pretty packaged as a gift. I alternate dipping in white and dark chocolate, and I don’t dust with cocoa because I’m lazy like that.
My husband is obsessed with snickerdoodles. He idolizes the little ones at the mall, which are probably made from the souls of kittens soaked in high fructose corn syrup. His mother recently made this recipe from McCormick, and he really liked them. They were a good combination of crispy and chewy and cinnamony, just like a good snickerdoodle should be. No kittens necessary.
The decorating part of the cookie exchange has gone from a mess of epic proportions, where I swept and wet wiped the floor maniacally in front of my guests, cleaning up the SO MANY SPRINKLES, to a fun and organized mingling of children and their icing. This is the scrumptious recipe I used last year from the Food Network. It’s insanely easy and it rolls out really well.
Happy Holidays!