The Christmas Cookie Extravaganza of 2012

When I was a young one, I distinctly remember helping my mother bake Christmas cookies.  We'd bake the family favorites - sugar cookies rolled around Hershey kisses or maraschino cherries, buckeyes (peanut butter balls dipped in chocolate), date bars, lemon bars, and a seemingly endless supply of butter cookies.  Those butter cookies were the star of the show, cut in a variety of holiday shapes and iced/sprinkled with care.  A few years, we even made divinity, a traditional Southern candy made with very hot sugar syrup and jello mix.  The divinity was quite memorable, since some of the sugar syrup leaped out of the bowl and onto my hand, instantly blistering skin and instilling in me a healthy respect for sugar work.  

I love the tradition of baking Christmas cookies with my mother.  Even though we've adjusted our routine, making smaller batches and swapping in new recipes for our older ones, it just doesn't feel like the holidays without a flurry of cookie baking and sharing.  

I've extended the tradition to include my coworkers, gifting them with boxes of each year's Christmas cookie offerings.  This year, I was responsible for choosing all of my family's holiday treats, and I wanted to include the familiar flavors of the season.  

Here's what we made...

Chewy Chocolate Mint Cookies

from Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Ingredients by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

This is their most recent cookbook, separated into sections by their 10 favorite ingredients.  While I've enjoyed their two previous books, this volume is definitely my favorite.  It has a whole section on pumpkin! And chocolate!

About the cookie:  Chewy texture, with a slightly crunchy exterior thanks to a roll in some granulated sugar.  Studded with chocolate chunks.  A rich dark chocolate and strong peppermint flavor

Ginger Rum Molasses Cookies (or Joe Froggers)

from Baked Explorations: Classic American Desserts Reinvented by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

Their gingersnap recipe won out over the more crunchy version of David Leibovitz and the chocolate-gingerbread version of Martha Stewart.  I suspect the winning factor was the rum...

About the cookie:  Chewy, with a very mild crunch from the demarara sugar we dipped them in before baking.  Uses A LOT of molasses, so that's the major flavor you'll get from these, with a bit of gingerbread spice (ginger, clove, nutmeg....no cinnamon, which was interesting).  My mother claims to clearly taste the rum, but all I can taste is molasses.  Since we used dark rum, which has a strong molasses flavor, maybe we're both tasting the same thing.

Swedish Christmas Cookies

(aka Cardamom Shortbread Cookies)

from the Food Network Kitchens

Last year, we wanted to make traditional holiday cookies from around the world.  In our search for recipes, I stumbled across these shortbread cookies, laden with cardamom and lemon zest.  We didn't make them last year, but, oh boy, are we happy we did this year.  They're such a wonderful change from the other cookies and from more common butter cookies.

About the cookie:  Crumbly and tender shortbread cookies with the barest hint of crunch from the granulated sugar rolled around its edges (you could use colored sugar or chopped nuts to be more festive).  The smell of these cookies baking was marvelous, filling the house with a rich, exotic, spicy scent.  When you bite into one of these, you taste warm and comforting spice - that's the cardamom taking you to the fireside and filling you with warmth.  The lemon zest seems to get lost in the glory of cardamom, but I suspect it's supporting the cardamom's flavor more than I can taste. 

North-by-Far-East Brittle

(aka Spiced Pecan Chews)

from Sugar Baby: Confections, Candies, Cakes, and Other Delicious Recipes for Cooking with Sugar by Gesine Bullock-Prado

This book tempted me into the finicky land of playing with sugar.  While it has excellent explanations and creative (but do-able) recipes, I've run into problems with making some of the recipes.  I'm not sure if it is the recipe's fault or my own, but I followed this recipe and emerged with a not-so-brittle treat.  I love this cookbook, I'm just baffled about the results. 

About the cookie (err...candy?):  This candy was supposed to result in brittle, which means sheets of candy that snap and break easily into beautiful and irregular shards.  Even though I followed the recipe precisely, my product dried to a thick and chewy candy.  And by chewy, I mean this could sticks to and pulls on your teeth like those caramel apple lollipops you see around Halloween.  Since it was still quite tasty and I hated to see so much food go to waste, I decided to roll with my much chewier than brittle candy.   It's delicious, redolent with flavors of maple syrup, ras-al-hanout spice mix, and toasted pecan pieces.  A welcome change from the toffee so often seen around the holidays.  Eric and I combined our muscles to wrangle cut the "chews" into pieces as small as we could manage.  I'd like to try this recipe again, perhaps with a new and improved thermometer (though I genuinely thought my current thermometer--the third of its ilk in my home--was alright).

Apple Cider Caramels

from The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook by Deb Perelman

From one of my favorite blogs, Smitten Kitchen, this newly released cookbook is not only gorgeous, informative, and incredibly approachable, it's totally my new favorite cookbook.  It'll stay in the favorite category for, well, forever.  It's got everything, and Deb does her typical excellent job of breaking it down and making it work for everyone.  She previewed this recipe on her blog the day the book was released and I vowed to make them immediately.  Immediately came and went, but I still had to make them.  Cider and the promise of all the flavors of fall on your tongue?  How could I resist?

About the candy:  Deb's instructions are easy and clear to follow, but my caramels came out a bit harder than she intended.  Instead of cutting into pliable squares, they shattered along fault lines into pieces of their own choosing.  Oh well. I rolled with this as well.  They're insanely delicious, with a strong taste apple cider (make sure you use a good quality cider, like Trader Joe's!) and a delightful salty counterpoint from fleur de sel.   While these are rather hard in your hand, they soften up quite a bit in your mouth, becoming the stick-to-your-teeth-in-a-dangerous fashion for a bit before settling down to small pieces you can savor.

All these treats were wrapped in wax paper to keep them separate and carefully stowed inside of Martha Stewart's lovely cookie boxes.  They're the easiest and most lovely way I've found to package cookies for gifting.

So far, it seems that my coworkers love all their treats.  Most have declared the apple cider caramels their favorite, though Eric is quite enamored of the chewy chocolate mint cookies, especially once he realized they were chewy and not crispy, like the first cookie he'd sneaked for a taste (serves him right, stealing a cookie and snagging one of the few that didn't turn out properly!).  I'm hard pressed to choose a favorite, since my tastes change with my mood.  I can confidently say, though, that all three cookies are quite delicious in their unbaked form as well.

Oh, and one of the fantastic features of the cookies is how easy they are to make, compared to the usual production of butter cookies (mix dough, chill, roll out sheets, chill, cut shapes, chill, re-roll dough, chill, bake, cool, ice, cool).  My mother and I made all of the doughs the day before, allowing them to chill overnight.  We baked everything in a single day, which was fairly easy with the cardamom shortbreads being a slice-and-bake and the two other cookies being drop/roll into a ball cookies.  

And I promised to give major credit to Eric for his photography in some of these photos.  He was quite artistic in arranging the boxes and the cookie list.  He also snapped several action shots of the candy making process, but I didn't include them here (sorry!).  If he's not careful, he's going to become Hops' official photographer...

It finally feels like Christmas is coming!

What treats do you make for the holiday?

Do you have any family holiday traditions in the kitchen?