Jane, Hilda, and I made Christmas cookies yesterday. After
careful consideration, we narrowed it down to five different kinds: sugar
cookies, chocolate sugar cookies, Mexican wedding cakes, thumbprint cookies,
and apricot-filled sour cream cookies. We each made our assigned dough the day
before. I was in charge of rolling and cutting. Jane put the cookies on the
trays, and Hilda did the baking.
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| Cutting out the sugar cookies |
We started with the sugar cookies because they had to cool
before we could frost them.
Over the years, I have found that the best ungulate cookie
cutter is a Christmas bison. Their broad backs and stubby legs are far more
structurally sound than skinny legs and narrow antler attachment points of reindeer
and moose. Believe me, I’ve made my share of bald reindeer torsos and female
moose. Bison are not, of course, traditionally associated with Christmas, but I
make them look festive by putting a wreath and bow around their thick necks.
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| Cutting out the chocolate bison |
We debated long and hard between thumbprint cookies and
caramel pecan bars. The latter are always nerve-wracking because caramel is
tricky. You have to melt the sugar without burning it and then stir in heavy
cream, which is a big, sticky pain. The bars are really good if all goes well.
Nevertheless, we decided to make the thumbprint cookies. They were easier and
used up jam, of which we have plenty.
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| Hilda and Jane filling the thumbprint cookies with jam |
I didn’t get pictures of the apricot-filled sour cream
cookies or the Mexican wedding cakes. My recipe for wedding cakes only makes
20. I’m planning to make another batch before Christmas, thinking that my half
of the cookies will be gone by then. We only had to divide the batch in two
because Jane already made her family’s version, little shorties, at her house.
When making little shorties, one presses the balls down with a fork and bakes
them for an hour. In my Mexican wedding cake recipe one leaves the balls as
balls and bakes them for 15 minutes in a slightly hotter oven. Because of the
shape difference, we call mine “little roundies.”
We were all done with the baking before lunch.After bowls of turkey soup, we started in on the frosting.
Jane and Hilda did all the base coats while I colored the frosting and loaded
the piping bags.
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| Applying the base coat of frosting |
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| Stars and bells with sprinkles (the round ones are from the last bits of dough, the so-called "dog cookies") |
Hilda did most of the piping on the sugar cookies while I
put the wreaths on the bison.
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| Some of the cookies decorated with piped frosting |
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| A herd of chocolate-frosted Christmas bison |
We were all done by 2:30, including the clean up. Not a bad
day’s work.
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