We have a variety of family-tradition cookie recipes we like to make every year, but I've abandoned any kind of schedule for doing this. Once upon a time we liked to bake some dozens and give them away as presents to co-workers, etc. One year we filled up 30 cookie tins' worth, and that was, well, both an apex and a nadir. That kind of commitment is
hard to come by these days.
I may get around to posting the family recipes -- they were mostly included in The Hoffwall Cookbook (now still in its first printing, ten years after publication!) (For now, I've included the recipe for zimstern, which is a great cookie and simple but lends itself to exotic decoration.)
The one cookie recipe I long to make every year is chocolate crinkles -- which we don't, because of the boys' sensitivity to chocolate. Some of the more exotic (relatively speaking) cookies, such as thumb prints and spritzen, would certainly be eaten but we're not sure if we can consume them in sufficient quantity without having sugar-addled children upon us the whole holiday. At least not relative to the labor involved.
In any event, we got started last week with simple sugar cookies, and shape cutters. Duncan instigated this, of course, being the big baker in the family these days. In many ways these are the best holiday cookies -- real simple to shape and decorate, and enormously flexible with respect to the decorator's intentions. (Note our baker also wanted to make a lot of letters, and any cookie cutter can be made into a holiday cookie cutter with red, green, and white decorations -- our holiday cows are famous.)
The hard part for me to remember, the real secret to Christmas Cookies -- is to remember to have FUN MAKING THEM. When I think of those years where we went through a long list of cookies and lists of people to give them to and the mechanics -- well, it's nice to be able to give out a home-made thing. But when it started really interfering with a happy, sane, simple household at Christmas, it was time to put it into a pause. And so it is this year, where we're making cookies on a given night, preferably as a family, if we feel like making cookies, and we are also trying to keep our consumption down to somewhat-above-normal, but still-below-insane-levels-of-sugar, to keep the old holiday system in balance.
Next up: the gingerbread house, on the weekend. We're being smart about this this year as well: we have a plan for getting it eaten by the neighborhood kids before Christmas. Among other reasons, we did not want it to become a source of frustration for our youngest, who is a complex-carbs-fixated child and needs some positive encouragement and help in not pushing his natural proclivities too far.
ZIMSTERN
Yields 6-9 dozen
3 T butter (softened)
2 eggs
1 tsp lemon juice
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp ground or grated nutmeg
1/2 cup chopped nuts (optional) (fine chop)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 more egg, separated
2 1/3 cups flour
1 1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp salt
Pre-heat oven to 375 degrees.
Mix the butter, sugar, and two eggs, plus the yolk from the third egg, and add the lemon juice. Mix this until very fluffy.
Stir the dry ingredients together in a separate bowl, then blend into the sugar mix.
Roll the dough out into three chunks of about 1/3 of the total each, to about 1/16th of an inch thick, on a lightly-floured board. Cut with cookie cutters, and put cookies on a lightly-greased cookie sheet. Fluff the egg white, and brush the tops of the cookies. Decorate the tops with colored sugars, etc. The tops can also be coated with food coloring, or you can divide the egg white into little bowls, color each little bowl, and use it as "paint" for each cookie.
Bake 10 minutes per sheet, removing to cooling rack while you lay out the next batch.
The origin of this recipe is obscure to me; it was one of the recipes I copied from my mother's 3 x 5 card recipe box when I set out on my own for the first time. It may have its origin with her or with my Grandmother.
