Christmas Cookies

[Intaglio]

What is your favorite?

Mine is Pecan Sandies after baked rolled in powered sugar, this was a special cookie only made for Christmas.

My daugther's is the Sugar Cookies that you have the cookie cutters for Christmas (like Snowman, Candy Cane, etc, Christmas themed), because she can decorate after the cookies are baked.

[CrazyCatLady]

For a couple of years, I made some German Christmas cookies that were topped with almond slices, maraschino cherry halves, and a rum/powedered sugar glaze. My god, they were good, but then I lost the recipe.

[GingerOfTheNorth]

Shortbread! Shortbread! Shortbread!

[White Ink]

Intaglio, I'm with your daughter, well gingerbreadmen too.

CrazyCatLady Those are called Nurnberger, and by freakish coincident, I got the recipe for it today. Here it is:

Nurnberger

For the cookies:
1 cup (250 ml) honey
3/4 cup (180 ml) brown sugar, packed
1 egg
1 Tbs (15 ml) lemon juice
1 tsp (5 ml) grated lemon rind
2 3/4 cups (680 ml) all-purpose flour
1 tsp (5 ml) ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp (2 ml) baking soda
1/2 tsp (2 ml) ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp (2 ml) ground allspice
1/4 tsp (1 ml) ground cloves
Blanched almond halves
Candied cherries, halved

For the icing:
1 cup (250 ml) sugar
1/2 cup (125 ml) water
1/4 cup (60 ml) confectioner's sugar

To make the cookies, stir together the honey, brown sugar, egg, lemon
juice, and lemon rind. Sift together the dry ingredients and add to
the wet ingredients, stirring to combine thoroughly. Chill the dough
overnight. Roll the dough to a thickness of 1/4 inch (5 mm) and cut
into 2-inch (5 cm) rounds. Place on a greased baking sheet and
arrange 3 to 5 almond halves in the shape of the petals of a daisy
around a half cherry in the center. Bake in a preheated 400F (200C)
oven for 10 to 12 minutes, until just set. Meanwhile, make the icing
by bringing the sugar and water to a boil in a small saucepan. Boil
until it reaches the thread stage, 230F (110C) on a candy thermometer.
Remove from the heat and stir in the confectioner's sugar. (If the
icing becomes crystalline while you are brushing the cookies, you may
reheat it and add a few drops of water until it becomes smooth and
clear again.) Remove the cookies from the baking sheet immediately
upon taking them from the oven and brush with the icing. Cool and
store in an airtight container. These cookies are best if allowed to
"mellow" for 2 to 3 days before eating. Makes about 6 dozen cookies.

[Derleth]

I remember once eating chocolate cookies with mint frosting drizzled on them. They were good.

[Rusty Scupper]

I like mini-struedels, coiled pastry with jam center and powdered sugar or nutmeg on top.

[Chefguy]

I'm partial to orange-nut crisps, almond balls (Mexican wedding cakes), butterfingers and spritz, all from my mother's personal cookbook. My sister makes a cookie that looks like a miniature croissant, but is filled with a streusel of brown sugar, butter and nuts.

[chique]

Sand bakkels* and krumkakka**, both a Scandahoovian thing.

The other day my sister and I were talking about how much we love gramma for bringing the good recipes with her on the boat and leaving the one for lutefisk in the Old Country, where it belongs. :D

*Essentially an almond-flavored sugar cookie baked in a tin that looks like a cupcake wrapper. Pain IN the ass to make.

**Kinda like a pizelle but different. BIGGER pain in the ass to make.

[flodnak]

One does not make krumkaker, chique. One buys krumkaker at the bakery. ;)

This year I'm making honey cake, banana bread, fudge (these three are already made and in the freezer), chocolate chip cookies, ginger snaps, and oatmeal butterscotch cookies. We'll be buying pepperkaker and krumkaker. If I'm inspired enough, I might add those five-layer bar cookies with the chocky chips and coconut and all, and Rice Krispie treats to the mix.

[GingerOfTheNorth]

Not a cookie, but still a Christmas tradition - also a Scandihoovian thing (nice to see we're not the only people that call it that, we Canadian Icelanders): Venar Terta. It's 4 layers of pastry, with cooked-down dates in the three layers between. The only person who has ever eaten it that didn't like it is my cousin Brenda, who is by all accounts a strange woman. Ummie (Grandmother) would make it with jam for her. Weirdo.

It's a really delicate flavour, despite what you'd expect from dates. Deeeeeeelicious.

[LifeOnWry]

I made some spritz cookies last year from a spice cookie recipe and replaced about half the cinnamon with cardamom. Holy cats, they were good! They are my new favorite.

I do enormous cookie trays every year as gifts. My personal record was 30 kinds of cookies, but I discovered that was absolutely insane, so now I limit myself to ten kinds: gingerbread, the aforementioned spice spritz, regular spritz, chocolate crinkles, jam-filled peanut cookies, coffee-molasses-pecan cookies, biscotti, "tuxedo" cookies (chocolate and sugar cookie cutouts, each drizzled with the opposite flavor icing and layered together), Russian teacakes (the same thing as walnut balls, Mexican wedding cookies, etc) and peanut-butter-with-embedded-Hershey's-kisses.

[Pábitel]

Chocolate Molassas Cookies!

These are absolutely the best cookies ever. The cookie itself is very dark and not sweet. It is a very, very dark, rich dough. Once they are rolled out, cut, baked and cooled they are then frosted with "seven minute" frosting a very thick sticky confection that looks like marshmallow creme going on but then hardens to a shiney white crust.

Eating these if very different from most cookies because vitually all the sweetening is contained in the frosting. So when you take a bite and start chewing the flavor changes considerably.

I'm sitting here salivating just thinking about them.

[Indygrrl]

Degrance, do you happen to have that recipe?

I always make Mexican Wedding Cakes, but my tray of goodies is mostly candy and fudge.

[VunderBob]

Originally posted by chique
Sand bakkels* and krumkakka**, both a Scandahoovian thing.

The other day my sister and I were talking about how much we love gramma for bringing the good recipes with her on the boat and leaving the one for lutefisk in the Old Country, where it belongs. :D

*Essentially an almond-flavored sugar cookie baked in a tin that looks like a cupcake wrapper. Pain IN the ass to make.

**Kinda like a pizelle but different. BIGGER pain in the ass to make.

Scandinavian descent, and no peparkorkar?

Or however the hell you spell that Swedish word in English...

[Intaglio]

From my Childhood, my Dad would make Springerlies - German Anise Cookies. And my Mom would make a FruitCake Cookie, but they are so good.

And my Dad would make Caramels and Mom would make Candies.
Chocolate Covered Cherries, Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups, and other Chocolates with Nuts and other additions.

[Intaglio]

Oh, I forgot, Mom would make Fudge, but I don't like Fudge.

[DeVena]

OOOooo My mom makes a chocolate fudge with JIF peanut butter that is the best EVAH!

And Divinity! And Butter Cookies! And Fried Apple Pies!

Damn, now I'm hungry!

[Left Hand of Dorkness]

I make much more modest cookie baskets for people for Christmas -- usually it contains some combination of angel slices, orange brownies, fudge, lemon bars, and caffeine cookies.

Angel slices are a wonderful Joy of Cooking recipe: shortbread covered with pecans, coconut, and a lemon frosting.

Orange brownies are regular brownies with a layer of chocolate melted on top and sprinkled with little triangles of home-candied orange peels; the effect is something like a mosaic. There's also orange zest in the brownies. They're most people's favorite.

Lemon bars are obvious, but I make them huge and tall and sour, heavy on the lemon curd. They pucker your mouth up but good, and they're my favorite. NObody else makes them right, if you ask me.

Caffeine cookies are regular chocolate chip cookies with a third of a cup of Turkish coffee grounds mixed into the batter. My brother could live off these things.

Yay baking!
Daniel

[LSLGuy]

I like the basic flat ones you roll out and cut into shapes with cookie-cutters. But they've got to be reindeer-shaped and frosted with bright purple icing with a candy red-hot on the nose.

"Purple Rudolphs" (pronounced ROO-doffs) are what the season is all about. It's great to be 6 again.

How Mom survived our kid-cuisine experiments I'll never know.

[carimwc]

Chefguy I think those crescent shaped cookies are what we call Nut Twists. My mom makes them every year and I made them for our office cookie exchange last year and they were a huge hit.

Candy cane cookies, tossies, molasses cookies, the peanut butter kisses, penuche fudge (my favorite) and regular old fudge. Mmmmmmm. Good stuff.

She used to make gingerbread men with the cinnamon hots as buttons and these little metallic balls for eyes. So yum!

[White Ink]

Mr. Dorkness What would I have to do to get some of those delightful sounding orange brownies?

Slobber!

[scout1222]

Man, right now I'm wishing I lived in Ashville. Caffeine cookies, ideed!

I very rarely make cookies, and don't have any specific Christmas cookie memories. But for some reason I have a hankering to bake this year. I'm either going to go for some shortbread, or make some concoction that has peanut butter chips in it, just 'cause that sounds yummy to me right now.

[chique]

Originally posted by flodnak
One does not make krumkaker, chique. One buys krumkaker at the bakery. ;)Coincidentally, I found out just this week that the local hoity-toity grocery store (as opposed to the others all us normal schlubs frequent) is carrying both this year. Things that make you go hmmm.....

vunderbob, I think two pain IN the ass Scandahoovian cookies are quite enough. The rest of our normal repetoire consists of five or six pain IN the ass cookies from other places. By the end of the day we're normally ready to kill each other. . .

[gotpasswords]

I'm of German descent, so the cookies I grew up with, and hence, crave, are:

Springerle
Lebkuchen
Pfefferneusse

Sugar cookies, spritz and such are just meh.

[c_carol]

Moravian spice cookies.

[Undine]

Pfeffernuesse. And pepparkakor. Oh yeah.

As far as the cut-out-and-decorate category goes, I've never really liked sugar cookies, they're usually kind of squishy and bland. Homemade gingerbread men, though, with cinnamon imperials...

[Proudest Monkey]

Christmas just wouldn't be the same without my Grammie Rand's Scotch Cakes which are an iced shortbread-type cookie.

As for the rest of the Christmas cooking, it runs more toward candy (chocolate dipped coconut balls which taste like Mounds, homemade peanut butter cups, homemade caramels). Mmmm...my mouth waters.

[The13thUnicorn]

I make shortbread and dip one end in dark chocolate every year. My father complained so much the one year that I didn't, I make them every year.

[DaisyFace]

I am the offical cookie baker in my family, but I go do it at Mom's house since she has the nice kitchen and the big island for cooling the cookies.

Every year, I am contractually obligated to make:
Chocolate chip
Almie's Peanut Butter Cookies
Uncle Bob's Sugar Cookies
Shortbread with melted Hershey bar and peanuts
Skor(TM) Bar Cookies (OMG! The recipe is on the back of the Skor chips bag in the baking section. Wow!)

I also have made:
Lemon Bars (regular and sugar free)
Press Cookies (never again)
Cut-out cookies
Candy Cane Cookies
Mary-Pat's 7 Layer Cookies

The best thing isn't even a cookie. I make a Kuchen dough (from Gramma's 1934 Settlement Cookbook recipe) and turn it into sticky buns, coffee cake and/or struesel.

I also like to make gingerbread but no one else in my family likes it so I haven't made it in a while. BTW anyone else notice how the best recipes have someone's name attached (or at least you know whose recipe it is)? Yay Christmas.

[Barks' dog food]

Originally posted by flodnak
One does not make krumkaker, chique. One buys krumkaker at the bakery. ;)
:eek: Next you'll be telling me you buy your Christmas tree.

This year I'm making honey cake, banana bread, fudge (these three are already made and in the freezer), chocolate chip cookies, ginger snaps, and oatmeal butterscotch cookies. We'll be buying pepperkaker and krumkaker. If I'm inspired enough, I might add those five-layer bar cookies with the chocky chips and coconut and all, and Rice Krispie treats to the mix.

No Peppernøtter?

[Rick]

Originally posted by LifeOnWry
I do enormous cookie trays every year as gifts. My personal record was 30 kinds of cookies, but I discovered that was absolutely insane, so now I limit myself to ten kinds:
LifeOnWry Are you my wife? :confused:

This is exactly what my wife does every year, I carry a huge baker's tray of cookies into the offie every year. People stand around like vultures waiting....

[flodnak]

Originally posted by Barks' dog food
:eek: Next you'll be telling me you buy your Christmas tree.
Sit down and put your head between your knees, Barkie. We have an artificial tree, owing to the fact that the little flodnaks and I enjoy breathing.
No Peppernøtter? Nobody ever eats them at Casaflodnak. I suppose we could sort of have them as garnish on the plate or something, but they take up valuable space that could be put to better use holding more krumkaker and chocky chips....