Last week, I made Christmas cookies for a relative in
South Dakota. Anyone who has made something which needs to be shipped, knows
it’s best to keep decorating to a minimum. And the goodies should be a bit
sturdier.
When you need a cookie chameleon, sugar cookie is your
dough. Basic round slice & bake, decorated cut-outs, sculpted shapes,
wrapped around a filling – I’m not sure there is anything this dough can’t do.
It also lends itself to different flavors, a nifty trick I took advantage of
for my gift.
Since these cookies were going to be shipped more than
1,000 miles, I made choices which could easily be packaged in vacuum-sealed
bags. (Single layer per bag, with packing peanuts filling gaps in the shipping
box). Cookies decorated with hard icing like Royal, or covered with sugar sprinkles,
might be OK in a snug-fitting plastic bag. However, I knew the recipient wouldn’t
mind something a bit simpler. I settled on Christmas Bells and Chocolate Mint
Pillows. Both recipes came from Better Homes & Gardens publications. (See
pics below) The Chocolate Mint Pillows are made from one third of a big batch
sugar cookie dough recipe. I didn’t need so much dough, and after a bit of
comparing, realized the Christmas Bells recipe was a sugar cookie with a
smaller yield. If I was making two different kinds of sugar cookie, why not
make one big dough recipe? Each cookie has flavor add-ins in addition to
vanilla. The bells have orange zest. The pillows have green food coloring and
mint extract. (You can use mint oil instead. A few drops are enough.) It’s much
easier to customize during the “construction” phase, rather than kneading into
the dough. Then you know everything is completely incorporated. Over-working
the dough will also create a tough cookie. Sugar cookie dough isn’t very
complicated, and doesn’t take much extra time to make separate batches.
Christmas Bells are a slice & bake cookie with a
twist. After the rounds are sliced, a maraschino cherry half is placed near one
edge and the dough above is folded from each “side” to create the bell shape.
Dried, candied maraschino cherries, found in the produce dept. during the
holidays, are the usual choice here. The Chocolate Mint Pillows are rolled out
and cut into squares which are large enough to fold over the individual
sections of chocolate candy bars (think Hershey). I decided to use Andes
chocolate mints instead. The recipe yields 30 cookies, so unwrapping individual
mints wasn’t exactly a time saver. Probably took as much time as
breaking/cutting a few candy bars apart, but easy enough to do while the dough
was chilling. I also didn’t decorate with a melted chocolate drizzle as
instructed by the recipe. Like icing, I didn’t think it would do well in the
vacuum-sealed packaging. No point in wasting good chocolate on a plastic bag. Despite
a lack of fancy embellishment, both cookies were delicious. (Yes, I had to
sample a couple to make sure they were good.)
The package arrived at its destination early this week, apparently with the cookies intact. And even though simple, they made someone happy, which is what matters most.
The Project Queen
Christmas Bells
“Holiday
Desserts”, found at a grocery checkout, was an impulse purchase I made in 1988.
My
husband and I got married in early October, and since we dated less than a year
before
we got married, it was our first Christmas together as a couple.
Which
probably explains why an old magazine is still lurking in my cookbook
collection.
Chocolate Mint
Pillows
My
copy of “Christmas All Through the House” is copyrighted 1999.
Mine was a book club purchase when it was first
released.
A
few months later, it made the move to Texas with us
where
I was anticipating decorating a larger house with a real fireplace.
Though
no longer in print, it doesn’t seem difficult to find used copies available
for
a reasonable price.
In
six more years, it will be vintage.
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