The Twelve Days of Christmas Cookies: Deck the Halls

The recipes I share with you in the Deck the Halls cookie collection are tried, true, and terrific. They are the best-of-the-best in flavor, texture, and overall appeal, honed over many years of obsessive testing.

I am NOT baking Christmas cookies this year. Repeat. Not Baking Cookies This Year. It’s official. No cookies for You-Know-Who-You-Are. The time! The work! The expense! The insufficient appreciation (no amount could be enough) for the weeks of baking and hundreds of dollars worth of the finest obtainable unsalted butter, flour, sugars (4 types), eggs, almonds, pecans, hazelnuts, walnuts, couverture chocolate, cocoa, spices, extracts, multi-hued sanding sugars/glitters/lusters, and lord knows what else.

Not to mention the days and weeks spent going over my notes from past cookie creations and pouring through cookbooks and magazines for inspiration.

Not to mention the mandatory trip across the Lake Washington bridge in early evening rush hour traffic (how do people do this every day?) to make it to the best (maybe only) cookie baking shop in the universe, Cookies in Seattle, before they close at 6:00, so that I can stock up on the latest cookie paraphernalia.

Not to mention the weeks of extreme kitchen chaos and mess-flour over all the counters, cookie cutters piled high to the moon, baking sheets spread over every available surface, mounds of bowls, beaters, and utensils waiting to be washed.

Not Worth It! I’m done being a sucker, a wimp, and a fool. You-Know-Who-You-Are probably won’t even notice that they aren’t getting any Christmas cookies this year.

Wow, that was great. Thank you for listening. I feel so much better.

Now that I have publicly confessed my abhorrence of this obsessive, compulsive, completely lunatic-and not in a good way-yearly ritual, a ritual I have faithfully reenacted every year since the age of eight, let’s get right to the game plan, shall we?

Mom and I always reserved the weekend after Thanksgiving for Christmas cookie baking. We baked from dawn to dusk for two days, filling tin after tin with frosted, sprinkled, rolled, and shaped cookies, which we expected somehow to survive uneaten until Mom’s Christmas eve celebration, which came complete with Santa Claus appearance (Dad), presents for the dozen or so cousins, a spectacular holiday buffet, and merry making all around.

When the tradition gradually passed to me, I amped it up just a bit. Not the Christmas eve party (although I did do that one year, spending several weeks in advance impersonating a complete lunatic), but the cookie baking.

Because by then I was a working girl by day, I baked every night after work for three weeks, beginning, as Mom had instilled in me, the weekend after Thanksgiving.

The original eight large tins of cookies became dozens of tins, until last year, the entire kitchen was wall-to-wall cookies, packed in white boxes filled with chartreuse raffia, complete with the LunaCafe label on each one. My obsession seems to be turning into a business, and maybe that’s a good thing.

Baking cookies for the LunaCafe blog is a little tricky, as I can’t reveal or even get close to the super-secret formulations (10 years of dreaming, development, and testing) of LunaCafe OtherWorldly Artisan Cookies, which I hope to officially launch into the world in this lifetime.

There are already at least 2 individuals, whose names I shall not mention, who have tried repeatedly to guilt me into giving them the formulas (we won’t tell, we promise). However, concerning those particular recipes, I have a mind of steel and a heart of stone.

Nevertheless, the recipes I share with you in this collection are tried, true, and terrific. They are the best-of-the-best in flavor, texture, and overall appeal, honed over many years of obsessive testing. They are true Christmas cookies, which for me means that they have the following attributes:

• Excellent keepers (must store and/or freeze for 3+ weeks)
• Very, very buttery
• Dry, light, tender, and/or crisp-rather than chewy or moist
• 3-bite maximum, meaning small in size, so you can serve a variety
• Beautiful and festive
• Fun to make, fun to eat, fun to give

Here then is the LunaCafe Twelve Days of Christmas Cookies “Deck the Halls” collection. Beginning on December 1^st, I posted daily until we completed the list on December 12^th.

If you bake along, one cookie a day, you will have a wonderful selection of holiday cookies to share with family and friends, with time to spare. But whatever you do, you must come back on December 12th when I will debut the recipe for Ellen’s Swedish Pepparkakor–the single best cookie in the entire universe. Which is of course why we are saving it until last.

On the 1^st day of Christmas: Lily’s Swedish Vanilla Spritz   
On the 2^nd day of Christmas: Orange Vanilla Sugar Cookies 
On the 3^rd day of Christmas: Decidedly Lemon Teacakes   
On the 4^th day of Christmas: Once in a Chocolate-Spice Moon Cookies   
On the 5^th day of Christmas: Peppermint Stick Shortbread   
On the 6^th day of Christmas: Lemon-Lime Clove Sugar Cookies   
On the 7^th day of Christmas: Toasted Almond Black Cherry Shortbread   
On the 8^th day of Christmas: Green Tea & Rose Spritz   
On the 9^th day of Christmas: Almond Butter Poinsettia Cookies
On the 10^th day of Christmas: Lemon Orange Pecan Thumbprint Cookies   
On the 11^th day of Christmas: Candy Cane Butter Cookies   
On the 12^th day of Christmas: Ellen’s Swedish Pepparkakor  

But first you need to get prepared. If you plan to bake your way through these cookies, you will need approximately 10 pounds of unsalted butter (Trader Joe’s) several 5-pound bags of King Arthur’s unbleached all-purpose flour; a couple dozen eggs; 6+ lemons; 6+ limes, 6+ oranges; 6 ounces of candy canes; lemon, lime, and orange oils (or extracts if you can’t locate the oils); unsweetened cocoa; vanilla extract; almond extract; food coloring; pecans; almond meal (Trader Joe’s); spices; dark corn syrup; black cherry preserves; meringue powder (baking isle); fresh baking powder; and a variety of sanding sugars, sprinkles, and lusters.

You’ll also need cello bags, boxes, and/or tins, along with ribbon to package your creations. And don’t forget cookie cutters, spritz maker, disposable icing bags, tips and couplings, offset spatula, cooling racks, baking sheets and parchment paper.

Copyright 2008 Susan S. Bradley. All rights reserved.