A cut-out Christmas tree decorated with sugar, ready to go in the oven.
When I was a little girl, my mother baked what seemed like hundreds of thousands of cookies each Christmas.
She kept an inventory of them on a recipe card stuck to the fridge with a magnet, each one listed and checked off, followed by a note indicating recipe yield, all in her perfectly neat penmanship.
And you wonder why I'm "anal?''
There were Snickerdoodles, Thumbprints (filled with jelly and rimmed with chopped walnuts), Pecan Sandies, Chocolate Snowballs, thin and crispy Cut-Out Cookies, decorated with sugars and sprinkles (no icings), Gingerbread People and every kid's favorite, Peanut Butter Blossoms, each crowned with a Hershey's Kiss.
I'm sure there were others I'm not remembering. I have vague recollection of small, blond cookies studded with the sticky red and green cherries used in fruitcakes. Our family of nine enjoyed ice cream and cookies for dessert during the holiday season, and there was no better assignment each night than to descend the stairs to basement carrying a pretty Christmas plate, open each tin and pile the plate with cookies.
It's in that spirit and with that delightful variety of cookies in mind that I set about my baking each season. For me, one of the joys of Christmas is baking cookies, packing them carefully in cellophane bags or tins and giving them as gifts.
I usually bake four to six different kinds of cookies, and these are the guidelines.
1. Butter-based cut-out cookies are absolutely, positively mandatory. It wouldn't be Christmas without cut-out trees, ornaments, angels, stars, moons and more, decorated with sugars.
Cut-Out cookies -- angels, stars and trees -- cool on a rack.
2. There must be some kind of cookie with chocolate. Usually I make Chocolate and Vanilla Checkerboard Cookies but this year made Chocolate and Vanilla Rounds.
White and Chocolate Rounds, from "Betty Crocker's Cooky Book.''
3. There must be something crispy and gingery, either gingersnaps or Gingerbread Cut-Outs.
A naked gingerbread moose...
... and a gingerbread moose on its way to the oven, topped with sugar and crystallized ginger.
4. There must be biscotti (twice-baked Italian cookies) for dunking in coffee.
I've tried a lot of different recipes for biscotti, but always go back to a recipe for Almond-Anise Biscotti from Epicurious.com.
5. There must be something new and different. This year it's Lemon-Poppy Seed Cookies, from "Martha Stewart's Cookies.''
Lemon-Poppy Seed Cookies get a sprinkling of poppy seeds.
My boyfriend, Robert, sometimes complains in the days and weeks leading up to Christmas that despite the hundreds of cookies being baked at our house, there are no cookies around for him to eat.
That's not entirely true. He comes home to a plate of over-browned and reject cookies each evening during marathon baking sessions.
Most of the cookies I choose to bake are freezer-friendly, and stashed safely in the freezer of our neighbors who spend the winter in Florida, until it's time to package them for gift-giving. If you pick the right recipes, a freezer can be a baker's best friend.
It's five days until Christmas now, almost time to head over to Joel and Shirley's with a laundry basket, retrieve the cookies and pack them in tins and bags for delivery Dec. 23.
The cutters are rinsed, dried and put away for another season.
Or at least until Valentine's Day, when the hearts and flowers come out to play in dough.
Your cutouts look just like Mom's (except for the brown ones - that are good anyway.
Posted by: Martha McCormick | 12/21/2009 at 05:24 PM