Travel through Holiday Cookies

Danish butter wreaths, Moravian spice, Belgian speculaas, Dutch spice, Swedish Pepparkakor, just to name a few – I’ve tried to make them all, and many more. Nothing says Christmas to me like Christmas cookies, and every year I try a few new recipes in addition to my standbys. It also seems that I buy more cookie cookbooks, and more paraphernalia, every year. For example, I will never not buy a new snowflake cookie cutter – after all, there are no two snowflakes alike.

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A couple years ago, I started buying cookie stamps. I find them frustrating. The stamped image is never as clear as I want, but I keep trying. Ottolenghi has a recipe for stamped ginger tiles with rum butter glaze that are, not surprisingly, always a huge hit. https://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/soft-gingerbread-tiles-with-rum-butter-glaze

I have also been working on speculaas, and I have two take aways about these cookies: (1) they are a time-consuming endeavor that requires patience to gently work them off the molds, and (2) a deep imprint on the mold results in a much better image than a shallow imprint. The ornaments below are not too bad, but unless you know that you are looking for a sledding child on the middle cookie, it’s not entirely clear what it is supposed to be.

I love Moravian spice cookies, but I find that I hesitate to make them because rolling the dough to about 1/16 of an inch feels like so much effort, although I am always happy when they are done. I have used several recipes for these over the years, but I still have not settled on a favorite.

Sometimes, when you have done something so often you feel like you actually know what you’re doing, you make rookie mistakes, like not reading the entire recipe before getting started. I did that with Elisabet der Nederlanden’s Swedish pepparkakor recipe. According to the recipe, you are supposed to roll the dough until “very thin” “less than 1/8 inch.” As you are rolling, and rolling, and rolling some more, you can almost hear the recipe saying “no, thinner!” Apparently farm animal shapes are traditional, but not really having anything other than Christmas cutters, I went with toys.

In 2012, the year in which the Mayan calendar ended, we started having a holiday party that we named “cookiepocalypse.” We kept the name in later years and the focus is, of course, on cookies. Throwing a holiday cookie party can be as easy, or as complicated, as you want to make it. Many of my perennial go-to cookies freeze very well, so I start party prep with those a few weeks before the gathering. One go-to is this cardamom-orange cookie that I always do as snowflakes, but I leave off the sprinkled sugar to reduce sweetness. https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/cardamom-orange-sugar-cookies

Depending on timing, and freezer space, I sometimes bake then freeze cookies that will ultimately be frosted, and take them out of the freezer and frost either the day before or the day of the gathering. More often, I bake the cookies that will be frosted right before the party. One of the most popular cookies that I make year after year is a ginger cookie with a juniper berry glaze, also called the “gin cookie” by some friends. https://www.bonappetit.com/recipe/gingerbread-trees-with-juniper-berry-glaze-2

Cookies can take you all over the world, and they can bring you home. When I was a kid, my mom and I would make all kinds of press cookies for Christmas and deliver them to friends and relatives. Every now and then I break out the old press and make some spritz. Consistency of the dough is particularly important for these so that they break off from the press well. I also find that chilling the baking sheet helps.

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When I am making Christmas cookies is one of the few times that it is not all about Italy for me, but there is one flavor combination that I think of as Italian that is almost always in my cookie selection – chocolate/hazelnut. I typically make this excellent recipe in the shape of stockings. https://www.finecooking.com/recipe/chocolate-glazed-chocolate-hazelnut-cookies. I go back and forth about whether to use dark chocolate on the tops, for better flavor, or white chocolate because I think they make better stocking with the white.

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And, of course, there are all of the fun things that you can do with shaped cookies. There are any number of sets of graduated cutters – 5 point stars, 6 point stars, simple snowflakes – all of which can be used to build “trees” that can be dotted with royal icing “snow.” A little sugar around the bases on the plate adds to the snow effect, and hides any royal icing drips or green sparkling sugar that has come off the trees. These stack best if you use a basic butter cookie dough without any leavening. You can see that the darker gingerbread tree is not entirely straight because those cookies rise a bit and are not as flat as the sugar cookies. If you want a cookie that always keeps its shape beautifully, I use this Dorie Greenspan recipe Vanilla Roll-Out Cookies Recipe | Bon Appétit (bonappetit.com). If you happen to be wondering about all of these links to recipes – yes, I have them all cut out of the actual magazines from years ago.

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This post is getting long, and we have barely scratched the surface of decades of holiday cookie baking. I will leave you with a few photos of cookiepocalypse past, and best wishes for a very merry Christmas wherever you may be.

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