There is still flour on the ceiling above the peninsula. Not much. A faint white fan about the size of a dinner plate, right over where the KitchenAid sits, and I'm leaving it until spring cleaning because it makes me laugh every time I look up. At 7:15 last Saturday morning, Nora turned the mixer straight to the top speed with four cups of flour in the bowl. The old tilt-head already sounds like a lawn mower. On high it sounds like a lawn mower falling down the stairs, and the flour went straight up.
That was the first ten minutes of Christmas cookie day. By 5 that afternoon we had six kinds, 22 dozen cookies, and a kitchen that looked like a snow globe somebody had shaken hard.
The plan
Most of these go out as gifts: Nora's teachers (she has seven now that she's in middle school), Jack's third-grade teacher and his specials teachers, the front offices at both their schools, my department, Deb and Marcus next door, our mail carrier, and a big tin for Mom and Dad in Lewisburg at Christmas. That's a lot of half-dozen bags, which is why we bake once, all in one day, with a plan taped to the cabinet. Friday night we mixed the three doughs that need to chill. Saturday we baked two sheet pans at a time in our one oven, rotating top and bottom halfway, and covered the dining table in parchment for cooling.
The lineup, and how many of each:
- Cut-out sugar cookies, iced: 4 dozen
- Jam thumbprints: 4 dozen
- Peanut butter blossoms: 4 dozen
- Snickerdoodles: 4 dozen
- Chocolate crinkles: 3 dozen
- Granny June's date balls: 3 dozen
Ingredients
The featured recipe is the sugar cookie, because it's the one people ask for and the one Nora has the most opinions about. This makes about 4 dozen 2 1/2-inch cookies.
- 3 cups all-purpose flour
- 1 teaspoon baking powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 large egg
- 2 teaspoons vanilla
- 1 tablespoon milk
- For the icing: 2 cups powdered sugar, 2 to 3 tablespoons milk, 1 tablespoon light corn syrup, 1/2 teaspoon vanilla, gel coloring
How I make it
- Beat the butter and sugar on medium (not high, Nora) until light and fluffy, 2 to 3 minutes. Beat in the egg, vanilla and milk.
- Whisk the flour, baking powder and salt, then mix them in on low just until the dough comes together.
- Divide in two, flatten into disks, wrap and chill at least 2 hours or overnight.
- Heat the oven to 350°F. Roll the dough 1/4 inch thick on a lightly floured counter, cut shapes and move them to parchment-lined pans. If the shapes feel soft, chill the whole pan 10 minutes.
- Bake 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are just barely turning golden and the centers look matte instead of shiny. Cool 5 minutes on the pan, then move to a rack.
- Stir the icing together until it falls off the spoon in a thick ribbon. Ice completely cool cookies and let the icing set at least 6 hours, or overnight, before bagging.
The why behind all that chilling: cold butter holds its shape in the oven long enough for the flour and egg to set around it. Warm dough melts and spreads before that happens, and your stars turn into blobs. Every cookie on our list that needs a sharp edge or a round dome gets cold dough.
The other five, briefly
Thumbprints are a butter shortbread rolled in finely chopped pecans, pressed with a thumb and filled with raspberry or apricot jam, then baked at 350°F for 12 to 14 minutes. Blossoms get rolled in sugar and baked at 375°F for 8 to 10 minutes, with a chocolate kiss pressed in the second they come out. Snickerdoodles are rolled in cinnamon sugar and baked at 400°F for 8 to 10 minutes, pulled while they're puffed and cracked but still soft. Crinkles are rolled in powdered sugar and baked at 350°F for 10 to 12 minutes.
Date balls never see the oven. Granny's card has a grease spot on one corner and says only "Christmas" at the top. You cook a stick of butter, a cup of sugar, eight ounces of chopped dates and a beaten egg in a skillet, stirring, until it's thick and bubbling, about 6 minutes, then stir in two cups of crisp rice cereal and a cup of chopped pecans and roll it into balls in coconut once it's cool enough to touch. Jack gave them a six because "coconut is a texture." Snickerdoodles got his ten.
Make-ahead: every dough on the list except the date balls can be mixed up to three days early and chilled, and the baked cookies keep a week in tins.
What it cost
Ingredients for all 22 dozen came to about $90, mostly butter, pecans and chocolate, which is about $4.10 a dozen, plus about $9 in cellophane bags and ribbon. So a teacher gift of six homemade cookies runs us a little over two dollars. Ryan's contribution was four loads of dishes and one decision: the flour stays on the ceiling until Nora's old enough to find it funny instead of mortifying.
