Cheddar Jelly Thumbprints

I've made several variations on this recipe, swapping in and out different cheeses and different jellies, over several years.  My personal favorites are the sharp-cheese/spicy-jelly combinations but a milder, sweeter colby-apple jam version won me a 2nd place ribbon (and 3 lbs of butter) at the State Fair last year.  Feel free to play with flavors here!

I've served these as appetizers and desserts, and they prep ahead (and even freeze) fabulously.  Roll the cookie balls, roll them in nuts and freeze them.  Thaw before baking so that you can make the little indentations for the jelly.  

I also <3 that you make the dough in the food processor...so fast, so easy.

A neato-torpedo trick I picked up from Cooks Illustrated is to use a wine cork to make the "thumbprints"...very tidy, very precise.

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Bizcochitos

Have you ever had half a container of something you'll never consume again but hate to just pitch the rest?  I needed a couple cups of sweet red wine for a marinade and had rather a lot left over (and sweet wines tend not to get drunk at my house).  Cue the New Mexico official state cookie, Bizcochitos, to the rescue.

You don't have to use wine...in fact, there are a great many recipes for this cookie out there.  Some use sweet white wine, some sweet red, some a fortified wine like cream sherry or Madeira, some brandy and some just call for orange juice.  The really neat thing here is how to handle a rollout cookie when you don't want or have time to roll out dough.

Ordinarily, you would refrigerate the cookie dough for a few hours, then roll out and cut into 2" circles.  Firstly, this dough is very soft and tender which means it's a you-know-what to roll out.  Secondly, I hate rolling out dough, even easy-to-handle dough.  So I tried this as a slice-and-bake.  One recipe's worth fit perfectly into an 8x8 plastic wrap lined baking dish.  I fridged the dough as a solid square, then cut the square into 4 "logs", then sliced the logs for cookies.  The only issue is that the "logs" are square rather than round, but after fridging, you could roll them a bit to round them out if you really wanted.  Either way, much easier and tidier than rolling out and cutting shapes.

Note too that traditionally these cookies are made with lard.  Not having any on hand, I used a combo of shortening and butter.  Substitute 2 cups lard for the other fats if you want.

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Walnut butter bar cookies

Sorry this post isn't timely any more.  Parenting intrudes on my blogging some days ;)

I love these guys.  Finely chopped nuts top a dense, rich, buttery shortbread cookie and the recipe goes together fast.  In the time it takes your oven to pre-heat, you'll have the batter put together.  The cookie batter is made rather like chou pastry, in the saucepan you melt the butter in (if you melt butter on the stovetop).  It's not especially freeze-able, but it comes together so fast you don't need to worry about prepping ahead.

Recipe is from Reader's Digest's A Family Christmas (as all my holiday cookie recipes were this year LOL) That book calls these "toffee cookies", but I don't perceive "toffee" in this cookie so I choose to rename them.


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Fast Candy Chip Bar Cookies

As a kid, I spent what probably added up to months of my life baking cookies.  It was the only indoor activity my best friend and I could suggest that would guarantee parental permission to play inside during nice (read: sweltering, chokingly humid) weather.  For that and other reasons, I baked.  A lot.

I don't bake so much any more as an adult.  Partly because while I can put together entire meals days in advance, I can't seem to remember to soften butter to bake with.  Partly because the mixer takes up too much room in the dishwasher and requires its own wash cycle, either by machine or by hand.  And partly because I no longer find dropping dozens of cookies from a spoon or rolling dozens more into individual balls and flattening them one by one with a water glass relaxing or fun or a nice way to pass the time.  Mostly I just find it tedious.

So I LOVE cookie recipes that eliminate all of those issues.  This is really just the Toll House Chocolate Chip cookie recipe, but tweaked a bit.  I'm going from frozen butter to cookies in less than 30 minutes.  Shazam!  Pretty much all cookie batters freeze well unbaked, and this one is no different so that's extra points!  Freeze it on a baking tray if you have the room, or in a lump to spread into a baking pan after thawing.

My dad always made the Toll House recipe with melted butter rather than softened with the result that the cookies were somehow butterier than usual.  A perk of this method (besides yummy cookies) is that you can start with butter that's still freaking FROZEN and have cookies fast.  With liquid butter, you can also ditch the electric mixer to make the batter.  The texture you get from the melted butter also offsets the slightly tougher texture that can come from using whole wheat flour; as the butter incorporates more smoothly than softened solid butter, minimizing the risk of overmixing the batter which is a greater problem with higher gluten whole wheat flour than regular all purpose flour.

And lastly, by making these as bar cookies, there's no tedious cookie shaping.  Perfect!

Please note: I used cherry-flavored chips in this batch because I was overcome with Holiday Baking Brain Disease at the store when I bought these artificially-flavored droplets of partially hydrogenated Red No. 5 and I had to use them in *something*.  I also added 1/2 tsp of almond extract, which I highly recommend whether you use faux cherry food-like product in your cookies or not.

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Pfefferneuse Cookies

I don't sprechen much Deutsch so while due diligence has been done on spelling and noun morphology, please forgive the errors that certainly remain.

When I told my husband that I planned to make pfeffernuse (pronounced feffer-noose), he looked alarmed.  I think he related the name to the famous German game meat stew hasenpfeffer and thought I was proposing he eat rabbit-meat cookies.

What the two recipes have in common is pfeffer, "pepper" (not rabbit, hasen).  These are little spice cookies that do indeed include pepper along with cinnamon, cloves and candied citrus peel.  This the traditional "peppernut" flavor combination, but you can use this recipe as a jumping-off point for several flavor variations which I'll include at the end of the recipe.  I've made some of these variations before, and some are notes for things to try in the future.  The original recipe is from Reader's Digest's "A Family Christmas".

They are the perfect make-ahead holiday cookie as they must be baked 2-3 weeks before eating.  They come out of the oven hard but soften with storage.  They are ideal if you want to make holiday cookies but don't want to be baking in the thick of December.

Today's I Screw Up So You Don't Have To...when you toss the cookies with confectioners sugar at the end, don't knock excess sugar off the cookies by throwing them on the floor.  Or by letting a 3yo help you with that step. 

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Filbertines

This recipe is from A Family Christmas, a hodge-podge sort of book from Reader's Digest that has Christmas stories, crafts, menus, recipes, poems, essays and other Christmas-related oddments in it.  The cookie section is hands-down the best bunch of Christmas cookie recipes I know of.  Lots of easy to make, shippable cookies that just sing "Winter!"  This cookie is very suitable for shipping as well as for prepping ahead and freezing.  Freeze the cookie dough balls after they've been rolled in chopped filberts, and thaw them while you preheat the oven when you're ready to bake.

Filberts, also known as hazelnuts, are delicious little guys.  They have a sweet, unusually spicy sort of aroma in the oven.  They're a pain to crack out of the shells, but I was pleased and surprised to find chopped hazelnuts in the baking aisle at my grocery store.  And for about the same price as walnuts and pecans!  If you have food allergies to work around, you can use another type of nut.

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Peanut Butter 'n' Candy cookies

Or, How Prepping Ahead Makes Cooking With Kids Fun Instead of Stressful!

My older son's favorite phrase right now is "Mama, I haf an IDEA!"  Today's IDEA was to make cookies.  We picked out a peanut butter and chocolate kiss cookie recipe, but we didn't have any chocolate kisses.  We did have caramels and bags of Halloween candy (yeah, yeah, I cracked the H-ween candy already, but only for this recipe!) so I give you peanut butter and assorted-candy cookies LOL  This is a great thing to do with any leftover candy bars after Halloween.

It took about 15 minutes to prep while the boys watched a little Sesame Street.  Then Boy #1 helped me combine ingredients and shape cookies while Boy #2 got to play with all the toys that Boy #1 usually snatches away from him...good times all round!  I found the toddler help most useful in rolling formed cookie dough balls in sugar and putting them on a baking tray (I needed to rearrange them for baking ofc).  The finished product is not going to win any pretty food awards, but somehow the cookies are tastier when they're ugly b/c your kids helped you make them.

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Cookie Freezer Stash

Color plate from The American
Woman's Cookbook, 1944

I feel naked without dessert in the house.  Just gastronomically naked.  So I like having frozen cookie dough to make dessert fast when we find ourselves in a dessert emergency situation.  But when I want fast cookies, I don't want to have to roll, cut out, shape, drop, dust or engage in any verb other than "bake".  OK, maybe "slice", but that's my limit!  As it turns out, just about all drop, shape-into-balls, roll-in-sugar, slice and bar cookies freeze beautifully in their unbaked dropped, shaped-into-balls, rolled-in-sugar, sliced and barred states.  Yay!

The lime cookies are my signature cookie, although the recipe isn't mine.  It's from Herbst's The Joy of Cookies, but the author does NOT share the secret that these little gems can be prepared in vast batches, shaped, rolled in sugar, flattened and frozen for future cookie needs.  This recipe doubles very nicely.

The Molasses Softies are oldies but goodies too, from Natalie Haughton's Cookies.  I amend the recipe slightly to include my dad's trick of rolling "brown" cookies (like peanut butter drops or these molasses guys) in brown sugar instead of white sugar...it's a much richer flavor and more complementary to the "dark" sweetness of the cookies themselves. 

The coconut kisses are new to me though not new on the cookie block, again from my husband's grandma's 1944 home ec cookbook, The American Woman's Cookbook.  Only four ingredients and no mixer required...perfect!

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Breakfast cookies

I was feeling stuck in a pancake/waffle/muffin/fruit/yogurt rut with the kids' breakfasts (and eggs before noon make me feel blarky), so I thought I'd give these a whirl.  I'm not sure I can say that this is an adaptation of the original recipe, since there are only 3 ingredients that are the same, but the *idea* comes from Natalie Haughton's Cookies.  You can store them in the fridge or freezer.  The kids scarfed them down this morning.

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Savory & Sweet Shortbread

I adore shortbread, store-bought, homemade, doesn't matter as long as it's got real honest-to-goodness butter.  And of course, the dough can be frozen ahead for later baking!

The savory shortbread here is from the Argo Cornstarch people, but I used brown rice flour instead of cornstarch for the wee bit of whole grain goodness it gives.  This shortbread is kind of like a biscuit, but more intense...a two-bite square is a good serving size to accompany a roast and something green or to serve as an appetizer.  The original called for twice as much cayenne pepper as I've indicated, but that turned out unpleasantly spicy.

The sweet shortbread is from Natalie Haughton's Cookies and, despite the similarity in batch size, does not make nearly as many servings as the savory...at least not at my house.

Pepper Parmesan Shortbread

Makes 36 servings

1 1/2 cups flour

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

1/4 cup cornstarch or rice flour

3/4 tsp thyme

1/4 tsp cayenne

1/2 cup cold butter, cubed

1/3 to 1/2 cup sour cream

1 tbsp milk + 1 tsp coarse ground pepper for topping

Combine the flour, cheese, cornstarch or rice flour and spices in the bowl of a food processor.  Add cubed butter and pulse until the mixture looks like oatmeal.  Turn out into a bowl and stir in sour cream until the mixture just holds together.  Press into a 8x8 baking pan (disposable if you want to freeze ahead), or divide in half and form 2 1-1/2" diameter logs.  Brush the top of the dough (either form) with milk and sprinkle on pepper.  You can freeze either form now to bake later.  If you made logs, you'll need to at least chill them for a couple of hours before slicing if you aren't freezing ahead.

Thaw dough if frozen.  Slice logs, if using, into 1/4" slices.  Bake at 325F for 20 minutes for slices and about 45 minutes for the 8x8 pan. 

Scottish Shortbread

Makes 9 cookies

1 cup butter, softened

1/4 cup powdered sugar

1/4 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1/3 cup rice flour

1 2/3 cup all purpose flour

Beat butter, sugars and vanilla until light and fluffy.  Add rice flour and AP flour.  Knead mixture together until no longer crumbly.  Press into 8x8 pan.  Freeze now or bake for 35-45 minutes at 325F. 

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Peanut-butter oatmeal slices

My husband and his grandfather are the only two people I have known in real life who didn’t like dessert.  And my husband can be persuaded to eat some.  You need dessert in the freezer arsenal, end of story.  It's are also handy to have something like this in the freezer when you need a quick thank-you gift for a neighbor who keeps snow-blowing your sidewalk for you, ferinstance.

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