Christmas is over, the presents are unwrapped, we are on a hiatus from overindulgence until New Year’s Eve, gym memberships are being activated, and the landfills are groaning with the excess influx of tissue paper and wrapping paper and no-longer-necessary packing materials. Here in central PA, my cookie materials are packed away for the time being. For now. I mean, I have plans for cookies I want to experiment with throughout the year for next year’s bakestravaganza and will get to that sooner rather than later. And I like baking cookies, so it won’t be all that long before I’m back in the kitchen, standing behind my thousand-year-old mixer, whipping up something else.
But.
Holy pockets! That’s a lot of cookies.
So I had one of each tray, for both mine and George’s families, plus whatever else was given away individually to friends and urban family. What can I say? I’m a giver. A friend of mine, a professional baker, started asking me about what I was making and let’s face it–flattery will get you everywhere. Really, person who does amazing constructed theme cakes and icing art? You want to know what I’m baking? Me? Really?
D’awww, shucks. Oh…Okay!
Presenting! The 2012 Christmas Cookie Bakestravaganza and Candification Explanator. Broken down by tray.
Tray One: C is for Cookie
I’m starting with the lighter brown cookies to the left (cookies at 9:00!) and going clockwise, and if I’ve blogged about it, I’m linking to it.
Cinnamon Marshmallows (use the same recipe for the Bailey’s marshmallows; just substitute cinnamon extract where the Bailey’s should go)
Caramel Corn
Cherry-Lemon Shortbread with White Chocolate Drizzle
If anyone has any questions about anything I haven’t linked to (or anything I have, really), please feel free to ask!
So. There you have it. 900,000 calories later, is it any wonder I feel so desperately in need of Zumba? I think I have eaten twice my weight in these things, which then becomes a real conundrum as the weight goes up…must…keep…eating…
I hope you are all having a safe and happy holiday season, and that you’re ready with shiny new gym memberships come January. :)
Take 3/4 cup of butter out of the fridge to let it soften while you read this. And pre-heat your oven to 350°. Don’t ask questions; just do it! All will be revealed in good time.
There’s little that’s better than chocolate with some coffee. Unless, of course, you’ve got a cookie that combines the two flavors.
Behold! The little dippers. These festive beauties are also hand-held comfort nuggets, so they look as good as they taste. Added bonus: they’re really easy to make. Here’s the recipe, and surprise, surprise! I didn’t deviate from it much. So let’s get to it.
Put your flour, cocoa and salt into a bowl.
Of course you’ll stir it together. But first, just notice that it looks cool.
Give it a stir to combine, then set it aside.
Put your nicely softened butter into a mixing bowl and whip it for a minute or so, and then add your sugar in and cream the two of them together. If you don’t have nicely softened butter, you can of course do the “put it on a plate and in the microwave for eight seconds and see if it’s soft, and then microwave again” process, but please be careful. You don’t want the butter to liquefy, and as anyone who’s ever eaten butter knows, it’s verrrry easy to over-microwave into a puddle. Should that happen you would have to wait for the butter to start to firm up again before cooking, which is an ironic way to complicate this recipe.
Creamed butter and sugar.
True story: when I was a kid, I would cream together butter and sugar and have that on bread as an after-school snack. Of course I ate it on overprocessed white bread, too, so I was basically mainlining pure carbs. What a rush! I still sort of miss it.
If you ever wanted to know what buttery sweet coffee tastes like, here you go.
For those who think they’ve got such mad skills that they don’t need to crack eggs into a separate container in case they break any shell into it, let me remind you: I have been baking for years and did, indeed, break some shell into the egg. I was so glad that for once, at least, I had actually taken my own advice and cracked my egg into a little cup. Fished the shell right out, no drama, no concern about my cookies coming out crunchy-style. Since I’ve been able to find instant espresso powder even here in my tiny hamlet, I assume most people would be able to get their hands on some in their own grocery stores. If not, check out Amazon or other online outlets. Hooray, internets! Ingredients can be had.
Then add in your cocoa and flour mixture. What’s the magic word when mixing a powder into a whirring set of beaters? Incrementally. In this particular recipe, I was able to get all the flour added without having to mix by hand. You’ll have crumbly dough that looks a little like rubble.
Mmmmm, rubbly deliciousness.
Here is one of the areas where I deviate from the recipe. It doesn’t call for putting the dough in the fridge to firm up before you roll and cut them. Here’s the problem with that: butter-based goods, like this one, become notoriously difficult to handle when they’re warm. Rolling them out is fine. Cutting them with a cookie cutter is fine. Getting them up off your work surface and onto a baking sheet? That can be a bit of a problem. They’re too malleable and susceptible to tearing and distortion. Regardless of what the directions say, once you divide your dough in half, wrap it in plastic and let it firm for an hour or so before rolling.
Once they’ve firmed, it’s time to roll them out on a floured work surface. To preserve the chocolately goodness of the cookies, you can flour the work surface with a half-and-half mix of flour and cocoa powder. Oh, snap! Yes, you CAN do that, OMG! Works like a charm, and I am a total tart for all things chocolate. Then cut them out with a star-shaped cookie cutter (or whatever shape you prefer, actually. I won’t judge), put them on an ungreased cookie sheet, and into your waiting, pre-heated oven.
I know I’ve mentioned this in another recipe and I’m a little surprised this recipe doesn’t mention doing this since you can’t even come near the yield the recipe claims without doing so, but gather up the scraps from your cuttings, put them in the fridge (or freezer, if you’re in a rush) to let them firm up again, re-roll and re-cut the scraps to coax even more cookies out of your dough. And then bake those, too. Rotate the cookies once halfway through your bake time, and you’ll get gorgeous little chocolate-coffee stars that look something like this…
No matter how good they are right now, they’re going to be even better by the time we finish with them.
Once they’ve cooled, melt the chocolate in something nice and heatproof and deep enough for good dipping, in the microwave (or a double-boiler, if you don’t have a microwave, and check out this post to find out how to make an ersatz double-boiler without buying fancy dedicated equipment). Dip each cookie, one-third to one-half deep into the chocolate. Resist all urges to dunk the entire thing in a chocolate craze. Lay the cookies out on wax paper so the chocolate can get and then?
Chocolate-coffee cookies stretch as far as the eye can see.
In my frenzy of Christmas baking, I do always try to find new goodies to bring…or new interpretations of classics…or forgotten recipes that I’ll revive for a season. The point is, I don’t want to be known the person who always brings the platter of dependable sugar cookies. Take a risk! Mix things up! (Though fam, you can relax. I promise, I’ll bring the caramel popcorn again this year.)
One of the recipes I found was for these beautiful cinnamon-frosted cookies. For me, cinnamon equals hell yeah!, with the exception of cinnamon sugar on my toast because I don’t know why but I just don’t care about it. So cinnamon + white chocolate + cookie + I get to make swirly patterns? That’s a multi-pronged mega-win. When food and arts & crafts combine, there is little that makes me happier. When your first step is to cream together butter and cream cheese, it approaches the nirvana of cookiedom.
Let us begin.
Then add in the sugar, salt, baking powder and cinnamon.
Prepare powdery goodness.
A few notes about this step:
1) This is powdered sugar. Remember to pour your sugar in in parts, maybe a third at a time. If you don’t, you’ll encounter the very real likelihood of blowing a cloud of powdered sugar all over your kitchen once you turn the mixer on and the beaters start whirring around.
2) This recipe can unquestionably take more cinnamon. It only calls for a half a teaspoon, so the cookies themselves aren’t terribly cinnamon-y; they’re nice, puffy sugar cookies with a touch of cinnamon. If you want to make them taste like a cinnamon cookie with some sugar, then up the amount of cinnamon. It’s the one thing about the cookie I was a little disappointed in.
Don’t get me wrong; I got over it.
Next, you add the eggs and vanilla and then the flour. The same principle for adding powdered sugar applies to adding flour, so add it to your mix incrementally, and be ready to give up your mixer early–especially if it’s hand-held, since their motor’s not as strong as a stand mixer–and finish mixing the dough by hand. It won’t take long and in a matter of a few minutes you’ll have a beautiful, soft, slightly sticky dough. Put it on a piece of plastic wrap, roughly form it into a disc and put it in the fridge for at least an hour, so it can get nice and firm.
To the fridge!
After it firms up in the fridge, take the dough back out with the objective of rolling it out, on a floured surface, until the dough is about a quarter-inch thick. Don’t panic if it doesn’t roll into a professional-looking, tidy circle; when I rolled mine out, it ended up looking something like a map of Great Britain.
Perhaps I should start calling them two-tone cinnamon biscuits.
So here’s the deal. The recipe says to use a fluted cookie cutter. I ended up using a flower-shaped cookie cutter because it was pretty, and the place I went looking for a fluted cutter didn’t have any, and I didn’t think to look for biscuit cutters, OK? And by biscuits I don’t mean the UK equivalent of a cookie but rather, the big puffy things you get in American diners for a breakfast side, covered with gravy. It would have worked great and, if I’d bought a biscuit cutter, I would now have the perfect excuse to make biscuits. Sadly, that is not the case.
Happily, whether fluted or flowered, the cookies worked just fine. Cut them.
And bake them.
For some reason, the directions in the recipe don’t call for you, the baker, to gather up the scraps and re-roll them so you can maximize your cookie load per batch made. I nearly doubled mine from what the batch said it would yield, making it well worth my while. Once the scraps have been gathered you might want to wrap them in plastic and put them back in your fridge for twenty minutes or so to firm up again. I didn’t do that and really the additional batch was fine, but not as easy to handle. If I were to make them again? I’d re-refrigerate the scraps. That’s all I’m saying.
And! It’s important to know how your oven performs. I know mine runs a few degrees cool, so I left the cookies in for 10 minutes. Since there were trays on both my upper and lower oven racks, I rotated them half way through and turned the sheets around, since the back of my oven tends to be a bit more warm than the front of my oven. They came out perfectly! Lightly browned around the edges, golden on the bottom, nice and puffy in the middle. Let them cool for a minute more on the tray, and then get them onto cooling racks until they’re fully cooled and ready for icing.
Here is where the recipe and I wildly deviate. There are two flavors of icing to make for this cookie, one cinnamon, and one white chocolate. Both icings are made by mixing shortening with both white chocolate and cinnamon morsels–like chocolate chips, only different. (As an aside, do you realize how sad I am to know that cinnamon morsels exist? OMG, they’re fantastically delicious. I want to eat the whole bag.) So far, so good. But the recipe tells you to melt the chips by putting them in a saucepan.
That? Is a terrible idea. It is so, so easy to burn your chocolate or cinnamon in a saucepan. Unless you’re dying to throw out your batches of icing and start over, melt the chips in a double boiler, or do the every-15-seconds-give-it-a-stir-until-it’s-melted microwave method. If you don’t have a fancy double-boiler, sit a metal or glass mixing bowl over a pot with about an inch or two of water boiling in the bottom. Voila! Double boiler. Set yourself up for an operation that should be fairly efficient–bowls of icing, spoons for stirring and icing distribution and cookies should all be at the ready, because the icing will start to set fairly quickly. You can always stick it back in the microwave to re-melt, but try to do apply heat to your food as little as possible. After a while, it can stop playing nice with you.
So, spoon some white chocolate and some cinnamon icing side by side on each cookie.
And then take whatever you choose to use as a handy-dandy swirling utensil–I used a kebab skewer–and run it back and forth through the frostings until each cookie is smooth and marbled and beautiful.
This will proactively guarantee your inclusion on Santa’s “nice” rolls for the following year’s Christmas festivities. Work smarter, not harder, people. Because who can resist a swirly cookie?
Whatever, haters. No, I know it’s not even Halloween yet, but I have cookies to bake for the Christmas holidays. These things take time. It’s not as though they’re going to bake themselves, ohhhh lawdie be, don’t I but wish sometimes. I cruised my recipes, I cruised the internet, and finally started to settle on some (but not all) of what I hope to make by December 21st-ish, give or take a day or two for the inevitable pre-holiday, time-stealing, unforeseen gremlin attacks. I tend to over-plan and then wean out what seems unreasonable or really difficult as Christmas day draws nearer and nearer. What can I say? I like to bake cookies.
The first recipe I settled on–the first one that profoundly caught my eye, really–were these Italian fig bundles. I just went to Italy this past March so it seemed to tie in nicely as a retrospective, though since I’ve tied together “cookies” and “March” I now feel like I have invented my own personal challenge and have to come up with “my year in cookies”. Don’t bet on it. Maybe next year, when I’ve had time to think about it.
Anyway, these fig bundles. Baking for me is quite different than cooking. Dinner? I play with food. Recipes are guidelines, but they’re not something to hold to religiously. But baking? Not so much. Maybe it’s because I’m much less comfortable with it, maybe it’s because it seems so much more chemistry-ish to me, but my inherent disrespect for any given recipe stops at dessert. Normally I don’t go for sandwich-type cookies because by definition they’re double the work for one end product but…you know…these were fig, man. And they look like little raviolis. I couldn’t say no.
So even though they end up as a fountain of deliciousness, they have humble beginnings–creamed butter and sugar, some salt, some baking powder. When you add the milk and egg to the butter mixture, it admittedly looks a little bit like the Delaware River at low tide but stick with it, it gets better as soon as you start adding flour.
Not yet graced with the beauty of figs, but happily pre-measured and a good start nonetheless.
If, like me, you tend to lose count of how much of a particular ingredient you’ve added when you’re supposed to incorporate slowly into a mix, then do yourself a favor and pre-measure said ingredient into a separate bowl before you start adding it to your main ingredient mix. I never would have remembered if I was on my second-and-a-half cup of flour, or my third, but when you take a few moments to measure out three and a half cups beforehand then you can incorporate it slowly and not worry about screwing up your count. Work smarter, not harder, people. Once all the flour’s been added, divide the dough into fours, cover everything with plastic wrap and stick it in the fridge for at least a half an hour, while you make your filling.
The filling, the filling. The filling is this luxurious amalgam of dates and figs and raisins and orange juice, and it’s rich and pungent and texturally interesting. Again, I did NOT change a thing about the recipe (no matter how profoundly I may have wanted to), but for the next batch I’m probably going to set aside a few cookies so I can add rosemary to them. Because rosemary is awesome. And I think it would rock. I digress.
So put your beautiful figs and dates in a food processor, with the raisins and pine nuts and orange juice and zest and whatever else it calls for.
Dates and figs, dates and figs…
And then grind the holy crap out of them until they’re well combined and ready to go into a cookie. This is when you thank the almighty you have a food processor. If you don’t…prepare to get sticky. I’ve also just realized I’m wrong, I did NOT adhere to the recipe exactly as it is written because…and I’m almost positive this is true…I don’t think I’ve ever actually measured fresh citrus zest. Like I have that level of patience. And, OK, I had a tangerine, not an orange. But I just zested one whole fruit and then had a little snack, since you can’t store it without the zest. It will dry out almost immediately.
Once you finish your filling and your dough has firmed up for half an hour in the fridge, you can get to work on the cookie. I am not gonna lie: they took a long time. The 50 minutes the recipe people say it should take? Lies! Lies! All damnable lies! Unless, of course, you have a sous chef and a professional kitchen with a cool marble slab to roll out your dough on that will keep it firm yet workable. Let me put it this way: the presidential debate last night? Hour and a half long? Yeah. I listened to it from the kitchen, and while it was kind of interesting to form opinions based on what was heard rather than the combination of words and visuals, that’s another story for another day. Of course, I did everything including make the filling during that hour and a half–I wasn’t just cutting dough–but forewarned is forearmed, they say. Plan accordingly.
They are worth it.
Anyway. Roll out your first quarter of dough and trim and cut them into 2×2-inch squares. Yes, use a ruler.
Rulers are a surprisingly useful kitchen tool!
Since you’re basically assembling little, baked, fruity raviolis, make it an assembly line. Set out all your bottom layers of cookie, then add your dollops of filling, then top with the top layer of cookie, then seal, then cut the X-es in the tops, then egg wash, then finish with coarse sugar. So much easier than trying to finish one cookie at a time before moving on to the next. It’s all about finding a rhythm.
Moving into the “topping” stage.
Once they’re finished, just pop ‘em in the oven. The directions say to bake for 12-15 minutes. In order to get the nice, light-toasty brown color they became, mine were probably in for about 18 minutes and I rotated them once after 7 minutes, but I think my oven is a few degrees off. Let them cool for a few minutes on the baking sheets before moving them onto cooling racks.
It still kind of looks like an assembly line, no?
OK, so they’re not AS perfect as the cookies in the picture on the recipe website, but you know what? The person who’s going to bitch about that doesn’t deserve to sink their teeth into my domestic largesse. Because these little fellas are deeee-licious.
Thank you, thank you, I’ll be here all week.
If there’s a better way to kick off the baking season, I have yet to find it. I’m looking forward to the rest of the goodies I’ll be churning out of my kitchen.
I have always been a little bit intrigued by the bûche de Noël, a traditional French Christmas cake. It’s been said that they began in response to a proclamation by Napoleon I to close the fireplace flues and ban new ones from being built to prevent letting in winter’s cold drafts that they believed cause sickness. Because the hearth was dark and empty (or non-existent), bakers put together a tasty representation of a Yule log for people to gather around, and this tradition carries on to this day. I don’t quite believe this, as Napoleon I reigned in the beginning of the 19th century, long before the invention of space heaters and range-top cooking, so I can’t imagine how people could survive without a functional fireplace. There I go, being practical and ruining a good yarn, but whatever, it doesn’t make any sense. Anyway. Moving on.
Bûche de Noël are pretty and often quite elaborate. They’re made to look like a woodland log, so they’re covered with icing “bark” and are often decorated with meringue mushrooms and confectioner’s sugar “snow”, but depending on the baker they can get a little…see for yourself.
A tree log...with trees...it's a cosmic bûche. Did I just blow your mind?
Anyway, when I saw a recipe in Food & Wine magazine for Baby Bûche de Noël Cookies, I was all over it. Though, as always, I have made some modifications, which you are welcome to make use of (or not). And so. First things first:
Butter and sugars, ready for creaming.
How can anything be wrong that starts out this way? And then gets this done to it:
I almost called this "Mount Cocoa", but that sounded a little risqué.
And once that’s all mixed together and some cream is added in, roll it into two 16″ logs.
For some reason, this has me thinking about taking art class and learning about perspective. But I digress.
For those of you who want to know how they can possibly be expected to know how long 16″ is, I would like to suggest making clever use of a ruler, perhaps a tape measure. And keep it nearby, as it will also come in handy when you have to cut this down into two-inch pieces.
And at this point, the recipe and I somewhat diverge. It will tell you to bake the cookies at 400° for twenty minutes, which I (and at least one other commenter on the F&W webpage) feel is just a little bit too long, as the first batch burnt a little (but were salvageable) and had to be trimmed. Sixteen minutes works just fine, and rotate them once about half-way through. It will also tell you to frost them and be done with that, but of course…that’s not good enough for me.
One of the things I have always loved about the bûche is the broken limb fragment sticking out of it. I don’t know why, but for me it makes it fun and whimsical. How could I possibly mimic that?
MINI REESE’S CUPS!
Oh frabjous joy! Oh happy day! Cookies AND Reese’s? Perfection on a plate. So go ahead, frost the cookies, and then invert the mini-Reese’s and frost those too. And add in some holly berry sprinkles. Sure it takes a little extra time, but this is a special cookie for a special day.
Festive noms!
So maybe it lacks the meringue mushrooms, but I am officially in love with this cookie.
Joyeux Noël, y’all. Peace and health to you and your families. XO
