It's that time of year when cookies seem to fly out of the oven a mile a minute. Between office party potlucks and tins delivered to friends and neighbors, bakers put their cookie recipes to serious use during the month of December. And while the classics like chocolate chip, sugar cookies, and gingerbread never fail to please, when was the last time you dug farther back into your recipe collection and revisited Grandma's old-fashioned holiday favorites?
These are a traditional small spiced German cookie commonly seen during the holiday season. The native name is Pfeffernüsse, translating to "pepper nut," the aromatic cookie gets its name from the pinch of pepper added to the dough-here, we use white and black pepper for a punch of flavor. The sweet orange glaze helps balance the pepperiness of the cookie's spices.
These festive cookies are inspired by The Nutcracker's Land of Sweets sequence, in which coffee and sugar plums are two of the flavours used to conjure a fanciful world of decadent diversion. Anything from a hard candy to a candied fruit can qualify as a sugar plum and, in the case of these cookies, the sugar plum is represented by the amarena cherry. Coffee's bitterness balances the sweetness of the fruit and the rich butteriness of the dough, while the oat flour adds a dash of shortbread-like delicateness.
When it's cold outside and snow blankets the ground, try heating up the oven and whipping up a batch of Snowball Cookies. These cookies are crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, and with a hint of coconut added to the frosting, your senses might think you've been transported to a tropical beach. When you make coconut snowball cookies, it's guaranteed to be a white Christmas!
My late mother made a special Christmas cookie that required tedious decorating, considering each person's personal preference for toppings, and giving them as gifts to family and friends. They always had a place of honor on our family Christmas table. When she was no longer able, she gave me the cookie cutter, and my daughters and I took over the family tradition. It takes the three of us several days to make, bake, decorate, package and mail cookies to family members around the country.
