One of the things my family always used to do at Christmas was make Christmas cookies. When I moved in with The Husband and he told me he had never eaten a home-made Christmas cookie after I got over my horror I decided to rectify the situation. When we went shopping for cookie cutters however The Husband was fixated on just getting a Teddy Bear cookie cutter. When I tried to explain that Christmas cookies were more like Santa hats, Christmas trees or stars he insisted that he wanted Teddy Bears cookies. So now our Christmas cookies are always in the shape of Teddy Bears. The recipe I use is here from Alton Brown. I’ve tried a lot of sugar cookie recipes and this is my absolute favourite.
While I think is important to use butter in baked goods rather than margarine (Blech!), it become absolutely crucial in recipes in such as this in which there are few ingredients and the buttery flavour is essential.
First step was creaming the butter and sugar.
Then adding an egg and the milk.
And then incorporating the flour in batches. Batch one.
Batch two.
Batch three.
Once all the flour had been mixed in, the dough had to be put in the fridge for two hours to firm up. I’ve made this before and left the dough in more than two hours. Big mistake. It gets way too hard and starts to crack when your roll it out. This is one of those cases in which you have to have to follow the instructions to the letter.
The cookies are rolled out in icing sugar instead of flour which adds a nice coating to the outside and always struck me as particularly decadent.
Here they are, all waiting to go in the oven. I prefer my cookies nice and thick but The Husband likes his thin so I try to make half of them thick and soft and half of them thin and crispy.
You take frozen strawberries and microwave them until they become soft and then puree them in a blender until they are liquid. Doesn’t it look like strawberry soup?
Once they come out of the oven and cool down I bathe the cookies liberally in the icing. The combination of the butter cookies and the strawberry frosting is amazing. I love the icing because it has a fresh strawberry taste due to the pureed fruit. Making them together is a nice holiday tradition which The Husband and I have.
