Anyone in my family can tell you that I am a sucker for Christmas cookie magazines. I started buying them many, many moons ago, when only a couple came out about this time of year. I have always been on the lookout for new and exciting cookies to bake---I lean toward chocolate of course, and lemon and raspberry and nice looking ones that don't take much work. Every year over the last three decades I have sat and I pondered the pretty cookie pictures and I mark the front of the magazines with page numbers of the ones I want to try.
So far this year I have bought two cookie magazines, and I have tried one recipe. Peanut-butter, chocolate dipped shortbread cookies. Sounds good, but they really weren't all that good. Fact of the matter is, it's been five years since I really baked a new cookie that I liked any better than any I already had. So....either as a sign I am getting old or that I have come to a happy cookie place or that in some ethereal cookie way, I just realize I've gone about as far as I can go, I think I am done with trying new cookies unless one positively jumps out at me when I am stuck in the grocery line looking at a cookie magazine. So this year, I will make:
Pecan Tassies (maybe....My mother's recipe)
Shortbread Stars (from Fannie Farmer cookbook, probably acquired 20 years ago)
Raspberry Foldovers (from a magazine eight years ago or so)
Chocolate Raspberry-Crumb Bars (from a magazine eight years or so ago)
Maybe Rosettes (made with my mother's rosette iron...I didn't make them last year for the first time in maybe 30 years...a LOT of work...but with only 18 charge conferences, I may have strength enough to try again...)
And Starlight Surprise Cookies (actually I made a batch today...hence the picture above of a Starlight Surprise cookie)
Starlight Surprise Cookies have nothing to do with an outdoor theater here in KC of the same name (not Starlight Surprise Cookie Theater, just Starlight Theater). These cookies come from a recipe my mother made since I was a little girl...she would use Starlight Chocolate Candies---wrap a rich, wonderful cookie dough around one, put a "pecan meat" (as she would say) on top, bake and eat. Except even in the recipe book she made for me when I got married, she had stopped using Starlight Chocolate Candies and started using a little section of a Hershey candy bar. But we (I say we, because when I make these cookies, my mother is just over my right shoulder, which is where she shows up when her spirit senses that I need her or that it would just fill out my life more to have her present) still call them Starlight Surprise Cookies.
Cookie making and Christmas just go together for me. I think I have been invited to a cookie exchange in Corder this year, which I hope to get the date for soon and go to. But I think I may stop looking quite so hard for new recipes ...I won't become an old "stick in the dough" or anything, but maybe I will place my cookie quest energy into asking folks whose cookies I eat for their recipes if I really like their cookies instead of making Better Homes and Gardens and Pillsbury richer by buying magazines. Maybe.
2 comments:
I love a good lemon cookie.
I would love your Pecan Tassie recipe. It does seem at times that the old-fashioned cookies have more appeal.
I seem to have less and less time to bake now-a-days. Maybe this year, I'll make time.
I have a really bad fall and winter habit.....I make up a batch of chocolate chip cookie dough, gingersnap dough and oatmeal raisin dough.......then each night after supper, I bake up 2 (medium size- I try to be good!) cookies, pour the milk and count my blessings as I savor the cookie fresh from the oven.
I have (so far) not made any dough this year.....but this howling wind is making we want to bolt to the kitchen and start up the Kitchen-Aid.
I have misplaced my oatmeal raisin cookie recipe. I have had it for oh, probably 30 years. Can off a Rainbow Oats canister.....so if you have a oatmeal raisin recipe that warms your tummy- I am going to "test" several this fall/winter. A tough assignment, but I am equipped!
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