Every year I bought Christmas cookies from Kroger. They were an assortment of round, stars, triangles and everyone of them had a colored jelly candy in the middle. I’m pretty sure they were Red, blue and green jelly candies. I think the cookie was a shortbread cookie? Not sure. Similar to this except for the shape.
I bought a couple boxes every December for at least 25 years. Then one year the Grinch stole them. :eek: I haven’t seen them in at least ten years. I looked again yesterday at Kroger.
I’m pretty sure they weren’t a major brand. Always found them in the bakery section and not the cookie aisle.
I’m tired of being cheated out of my Christmas cookies.
Time to fight the Grinch.
Where do you find those colored jelly candies for baking? My Google searches are finding too many jelly candies and not the baking kind. Aren’t the candies fruit flavored?
Shortbread cookies are easy if I can just find the jelly candy for the center.
Aceplace57, The red and green atop the cookies in your link appears to candied cherries, or glace cherries, made by soaking cherries in a sugar syrup. The sugar syrup replaces all the natural moisture in the cherries. This preserves them, making them very sweet at the same time.
Candied cherries are often dyed with an edible artificial dye, or with red grape juice, to reinforce a jolly red colour. They also come in different colours, including natural and food dye inspired colours to make them green or yellow.
I believe you may find them in the baking supply section of your grocery store, perhaps near the chocolate chips.
I hate to say it, but it sounds like you’ve never had a “real Christmas cookie” in your life. Real Christmas cookies are homemade. I can have my Mom make you some if you like.
I bake Christmas cookies. Well, part of the reason is it’s my JOB, but still. I don’t remember the ones in the OP, but they don’t sound bad.
My favorites are simple cut out sugar cookies, iced, with sprinkles. Ginger cookies are good too, and I just baked a number of thumbprint cookies the other day. Haven’t done any gingerbread (wo)men yet, but those are good. And what about German lebkuchen?
It sounds like the type the OP is describing are spritz cookies: butter cookies with a piece of candied cherry on top. These are usually pressed out of a cookie press, but a person could just form a log and refrigerate the dough, and then slice cookies off the log and bake. Not as pretty, but less frustrating.
I usually make those, along with what my mother called ‘almond balls’, and others call Mexican wedding cakes. Basically a butter dough and ground almonds, formed into smallish balls around a cherry center. When done, they’re rolled in powdered sugar. I also make a tea cookie made with orange and lemon zests, and walnuts.
This year I’m going to try to make framboise, which more of a pastry than a cookie, but they sound terrific.
I remember back on a message board I belonged to [usenet] back in the late 90s we used to have a cookie exchange for christmas. It got to being pretty elaborate, with it being requested that you package up 6 cookies to a ziplock bag, and make IIRC 4 or 5 dozen so that everybody playing along got 6 or 7 types of cookies - basically enough different cookies to make a nice cookie platter for christmas dinner. One of the years I baked I ended up getting 2 different thumbrprint cookies - one strawberry and one mixed berry, small [3 inch] gingerbread men, 6 different shapes/colors of classic sugar cookies [1 each of 6 different cutters, all from 1 person] shortbread dipped in white chocolate and sprinkled with crushed peppermint candies, and cinnamon jumbles. I made lebkuchen, though I had to get my german buddy to send me the oblaten for them.
We have a friend who is eternally broke, so he makes 5 or 6 different types of cookies and makes up cute cookie plates and those are what he gives out for christmas to people. Very nice, even though I don’t typically eat any of them mrAru is a sugar addict and manages to vacuum them up in a day or so.
It’s kind of a sacred tradition for me. I make Christmas cookies in sickness and in health, while dieting or not, every year without fail. It’s a childhood memory and the recipes are my mother’s. I always seem to feel her presence when I’m making them, even though I don’t believe in any of that woo-woo shit. The framboise will be a departure from traditional recipes. I’ve tried a few others over the years and they just don’t taste like Christmas to me. But these are made with almond paste (which I could eat out of the can), and are topped with a glaze made with lemon. How can it not be good?
Mmm. Spritz cookies. Mom and I made them all through my childhood holidays, yes, it’s one of those things that Christmas just isn’t the same without. We made them with almond extract, though, and didn’t like the candied cherries, so just sprinkled them with red and green colored sugar. Thumbprint cookies with finely crushed walnuts and cherry jam, and frosted sugar cookies, of course. These were great-grandmother’s recipes.
Hmmm, do I need a cookie press or pastry tube for those spritzes? I’m thinking of rolling and cutting out the dough (I have some fairly small flower cutters) and putting in the cherry. Or a couple of almond slices. Or a pecan half. I might have to try rolling them out, and making drop cookies, and see what happens.
