DIY: Christmas Cookies

December 12, 2007 by Matt  Send to a Friend

Christmas cookies are those things that bring me back to being a little kid. That one day when you actually create something so damn sweet that your teeth rot for days (even with brushing and flossing). The lights, the music and the snow (which I remember DC getting a lot of in December back then) and the sense of community are all things that may remind us of this time of year. Last night I pulled out this old recipe and dove right in.

It’s a fairly easy one, so let’s take a look at the ingredients:

¾ cup Shortening
1 cup Sugar
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 ea Eggs
1 tsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Salt
2 ½ cups All Purpose Flour
Method:

Combine shortening, sugar, vanilla extract and eggs with a hand held or table top mixer (if you try to hand whisk it your forearms will die and hate you).
Once all of the wet ingredients are mixed, add the baking powder, salt and flour.
Cover the mixture in a bowl and refrigerate for 1 hour.
While the mix is in the fridge, pre-heat your oven to 400 degrees.
Get a wood board or a clean counter surface, dust it with flour and roll out the dough with a flour-dusted rolling pin. You should roll the dough between ¼” and 1/8”. Grab your favorite festive cutters and cut away. Your workstation might look something like this:

Bake the cookies for 6-8 minutes, cool and frost.
In an effort to save time as well as the fact that I was feeling a little lazy, I opted to buy frosting instead of making my own. Color the frosting any which way you like and roll with it. I recommend putting some holiday music on the old hi-fi while decorating. This is one of my personal favorites:

At this point in the night I realized how unbelievably horrible I am at decorating cookies. Thank god for Caroline, who made hers a lot prettier than the cookies I butchered. All in all, hopefully when you’re done you’ll have something like this:

We sure had a lot of fun doing it, and I hope you do too. Even if the cookies don’t taste that great, it’s like arts and crafts all over again. This will probably be the last DIY from me for the year, so I just wanted to say goodbye ‘07, hello ’08, thanks for letting me contribute and thanks for reading.

Happy Holidays, eat good cookies,

Love,

Matt & Caroline

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