Sugar Cookies with a Creative Touch

Sugar cookies are a delicious part of many families' Christmas traditions.

My family has made sugar cookies every Christmas for decades.

The different colors and shapes are festive and fun.

Over the years, though, 

I have found that my mother's and grandmother's 

traditional sugar cookie recipe lends itself well to variation.

With this cookie, one can use imagination and creativity

to come up with countless versions.

In  recent years, I have experimented with new ingredients and decorations.

 Breaking with tradition, I haven't frosted them,

and I haven't sprinkled them with the red and green sugar our family always used.

 I found a very pretty large-crystal white decorative sugar

which gives the cookies a beautiful, glittery white snow-like quality.

Besides varying the sugars for decorating, I've also used

 lemon or orange peel added to the dough 

to give them a subtle citrus flavor.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

I sometimes mix in 2 tablespoons of lavender buds

for a delicate flavor of lavender. 

When I first made these, I was concerned they would taste like soap,

but they were delicious, with just a hint of lavender flavor.

The lavender cookies are especially pretty with the little flecks of purple.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

I plan to experiment with other herbs or edible flowers.

Lemon verbena, pineapple sage, or mint would give a nice flavor. 

I bet the bright orange-gold petals of calendula (pot marigold)

would be pretty baked in. 

Rosewater might lend a lovely hint of rose.

But the cookies can also be varied using pantry items.

Add cocoa and mace to create chocolate sugar cookies,

or finely chopped hazel nuts for a sugary nut cookie.

And then go even further and make little hazelnut cookie sandwiches using Nutella.

Since today, December 6th, is St. Nicholas Day,

traditionally celebrated by placing candy or fruit in children's shoes 

to find in the morning when they awake and dress,

one could use a little of St. Nick's leftover candy
and add a tablespoon or two of  crushed peppermint,

  butterscotch disks or toffee to the cookies.

One of the great things I have found about these cookies
is that the dough can be shaped into a log and the cookies sliced off
in 1/8 to one quarter-inch thicknesses for baking,
depending on how crisp one wants the cookie.
And it's a real time saver.

Perhaps best of all,
when left unfrosted, these sugar cookies will keep for months in the freezer,

making it easy to enjoy a little bit of Christmas all year long.

Here's the recipe:

Sugar Cookies

2/3 c shortening

3/4 cup white sugar

1 teaspoon of vanilla

1 egg

4 teaspoons of milk (I use water instead)

2 cups of sifted all-purpose flour

1 1/2 teaspoons of baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

***********

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Cream shortening, sugar, vanilla.

Add egg, beat till light and fluffy. 

Add milk or water.

Sift dry ingredients and stir in.

Divide dough in half. Chill for 1 hour.

Roll out to 1/8 inch thickness.

Cut into shapes, bake on greased cookie sheet 

for 6 to 8 minutes.

Cool before decorating.

Yield:  2 dozen cookies

Enjoy!

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This is a Christmas Cookie

Hermits, the 19th-century cookie stuffed with raisins and black walnuts--

no, in my estimation, not a Christmas cookie.

Date Pinwheels, a delicious brown sugar cookie filled with dates and pecans--

maybe a Christmas cookie, but no, not quite.

The only cookie that symbolizes Christmas for me

 is the simple sugar cookie, rolled and cut out in Christmas-y shapes:

reindeer, bells, stars, Santas, gingerbread men, angels.

Crispy when baked under sprinkles of colored sugar,

soft when decorated with colorful frostings and a scattering of nonpareils,

sugar cookies have been part of every Christmas celebration

in my mom's family for more than a half-century.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

My maternal grandmother made sugar cookies every year.

She never frosted them. She sprinkled half with red sugar, half with green.

And they were very crispy. She placed them in a tin and would serve them

with coffee when the family gathered on Christmas Eve.

On the other hand, my mom's sugar cookies were baked with two purposes.

Some were baked with a red kidney bean placed in the top 

to create a hole for threading curling ribbon.

These were frosted and hung on the Christmas tree as decorations.

The remainder were for eating.

Making and decorating sugar cookies was a ritual every Christmas,

with my mom, brothers and sisters and I seated around the table,

decorating the "Christmas cookies."

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

I still make them every Christmas, 

but I have updated the recipe a little

because the basic sugar cookie recipe allows for a lot of creativity and variation.

Join me again tomorrow

and see how I updated my family's tradition.

I'll share the recipe then, too.

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And is this a Christmas Cookie?

In yesterday's post, I wrote about Hermits,

the Betty Crocker favorite cookie of the 1880s,

and a traditional Christmas cookie on my mom's side of the family.

For my dad's side of the family, the favorite Christmas cookie

of my Grandma Annie had to be the Date Pinwheel cookie.

She used to bake up a batch that yielded about 5 or 6 dozen cookies,

all of which she kept in a white flour sack in the pantry-closet in her garage.

The Date Pinwheels she baked had a soft but  firm consistency

and a sweet date and pecan filling.

I thought they were delectable, 

even though I didn't really consider them very Christmas-y either.

photo courtesy of morguefile.com

When I got married I asked my mom to write out family recipes for me,

and she did, including Grandma's favorite date Christmas cookie recipe.

But I only made them once or twice since then

because the dough is very heavy and has to be rolled out.

Frankly, wrestling that much dough takes some real energy and a lot of time.

~

I was curious about the origins of Date Pinwheel cookies,

since a brief search of the internet revealed multiple references to

these cookies and their status as a beloved "vintage" Christmas cookie. 

I found a really neat site called http://www.recipecurio.com

that is devoted to antique recipes.

It's possible the  Date Pinwheel cookie recipe

may have first appeared in the 1952 cookbook described on the site:

"Aunt Jenny's Old-Fashioned Christmas Cookies,"

published by Lever Brothers. 

As with Betty Crocker, "Aunt Jenny," was a publicity image 

conjured up to put a friendly face on a corporate product.

In this case, the product was Spry shortening.

The great thing about popular "vintage" recipes

is that, regardless of their recent history,
we can be assured that somewhere, some time,
a real Aunt Jenny looked in her pantry,

found dried fruit, brown sugar, nuts, and flour,

and created something delicious.

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