Friday is National Cookie Day! And why not? It’s the time of year when everyone is pulling out their favorite cookie recipes, creaming sugar and butter, chilling dough, cutting out shapes, piping icing, drizzling chocolate and filling tins. Even people who rarely bake have a favorite cookie without which their holidays would not be complete.
If you are looking for some new cookie recipes to try, I have compiled a list of my favorite cookies. I hope that you find something to inspire your holiday baking! First, I love a old-fashioned, cut-out sugar cookie. This recipe for Cardamom Sugar Cookies reminds me of our trip to Sweden this summer where we sampled sweet buns flavored with cardamom.
These cookies require some advance planning because you want to make the dough the day before you bake to allow the dough time to chill, as one often does with a roll-and-cut cookie. And because we are rather ecumenical around here, our holiday cookies come in Christmas and Hanukkah shapes.
I decorate my sugar cookies with royal icing that gets very hard when it dries. If you want to cover a cookie completely with icing, I recommend piping an outline and allowing the outline to dry. You can then fill in the icing on the rest of the cookie – which is called flooding — with a small knife or spatula. You can decorate your cookies further by dyeing the icing with food coloring or by adding sprinkles or colored sugar. But I love the look of plain white icing myself.
My all-time favorite cookies are these Halfway Cookies. Halfway cookies are a bar cookie in three layers. The bottom layer is a rich, buttery cookie dough. The middle layer is chocolate chips. And the top layer is brown sugar meringue. Just take a moment to think about that. They are achingly sweet. They are incredibly rich. They are, perhaps, the best bar cookies in the world.
A few cooking notes for these bars. First, let me assure you that they are an easy, kid-friendly project. I started making halfway cookies by myself as soon I was allowed to use the oven because my mother just wasn’t making them enough for my taste. It is important, however, to make sure that the eggs are separated well. If there is any traces of yolk in the egg whites, the meringue won’t whip up. So if you are doing this project with kids, you may want to separate the eggs yourself.
Because I am a canner, I love cookie recipes that use jam, like these Lemon-Scented Jam Thumbprints. There is no better way to get a sense of who I am as a cook that to try some of my Black Raspberry Mint Jam or Blackberry Sage Jam made with fruit from local — if local includes Michigan — farms.
If you don’t make jam yourself, you can absolutely still make these cookies. Just use the very best jam you can find. We all have a fancy jar of jam sitting in a cupboard or the back of the fridge from some long-forgotten house present or hostess gift. Dig out that neglected jar and give it a new life in some cookies!
These Key Lime Meltaways are a delicate, shortbread-style cookie and make use of a seasonal ingredient: Key limes from Florida! They melt in your mouth — hence the name — in part because of the cornstarch. Thus, this is an elegant, sophisticated cookie to serve with tea or coffee. A dozen packaged in a little cello bag tied with twine also makes a charming gift.
This recipe makes two logs of dough, each one of which makes close to 5 dozen cookies. So, Key Lime Meltaways are great for cookie swaps, holiday giving or other times when you want to make a big batch of cookies. If you want to a make a more normal number of cookies, you can halve the recipe, or — and this is my recommendation — freeze one of the logs of dough, well-wrapped in wax paper, for another time. It’s not any more work to make the larger amount of dough, so I say, go ahead and do it. And then you will have cookie dough in your freezer for the next time you have friends coming over, or you want to bring someone a little gift.
Happy baking!
