Throughout the month of December I worked on baking the Christmas cookies. My plan which worked pretty well considering I have two small children was to make the dough, freeze it, and then bake everything off in the week before Christmas. This year I made peanut butter blossoms, forgotten cookies, candy cane cookies, and sandtarts. Josie helped make some of the doughs and she also helped fashion the candy cane cookies and sandtarts. Playdoh worms help her practice the candy cane shape. The candy cane ones were new this year although my aunt thinks that my grandmother used to make them. I got the recipe from a magazine.

Somehow the art of the forgotten cookies has been lost in our family. They are meringue cookies with chocolate chips and mine and my cousins both turned out chewy rather than crisp and dry. I remember my grandmothers used to break into a ton of pieces (wait is that good?) and melt into the tongue. Our theories are two fold. One is that my oven does not stay hot long enough, these weird cookies go into the oven when it is hot, and you turn it off and leave them there overnight (hence forgotten). Alternatively, my cookies seemed kinda crisp when they were first done and my grandmother always kept hers out on the unheated porch where it would be much dryer than in our houses, so perhaps ours are pulling moisture out of the air?

I’m going to try them again using my bread stone. I’m going to heat the stone up along with my oven at the bottom and that will help retain heat and keep the oven warmer to hopefully cook the cookies more, but very gently. I’ll report on how that goes.

Plus since I’ve been having crazy mint and chocolate cravings, I also just made some chocolate chocolate mint cookies that I can’t stop eating. I used this recipe and added in 1 tsp of peppermint extract too. They’re really good. We’ll have to make them before Christmas for next year, or maybe not, because then I’d have to share.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 3:18 pm by Jen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.