I have never baked Iced Christmas Sugar Cookies in my life. Or, I should say, I have never wanted to. I made cookies with my stepmother every year, but I don't remember ever liking the classic iced sugar cookie. I don't really like frosting. I love creamy flavors and those are just hard to find in the holiday cookie catalog. And I have never made a cookie that didn't look like a mangled, melted version of what it was supposed to be when I was done with it.
But not anymore! I have children now! I am responsible for creating sparkly mystical holiday magic on the daily this month, since my husband refuses to let me Celebrate the Season until after Thanksgiving. This leaves me three paltry weeks to cram a lifetime of magic and stillness and miracle into our home. I must do it because it was done for me: the quiet, perfect, most glistening silence of Christmas eve and morning and everything leading up to it. It's so real, it's so worth everything we might put ourselves through to get there. Including making cookies I don't really like. (Now, Christmas Cookies I DO like? We're not even going there this blog. That's next blog, when I discuss, on a security-limited basis, my Family Caramels, the one thing I did make every holiday as an older child and then as an adult single woman.)
For toddlers, there is equal magic in cookies as there is in Santa and his mysterious reward-based time travel, or Baby Jesus and his confusing home-schooled birthday party, so I'm focusing on mostly carbs this holiday season. In fact, my baking instincts are on such high volume that I have been dealing with visions of cookies plates as I go about my day, throwing them casually like Frisbees into the homes of everyone I love within a seventy-mile radius, singing a harmonizing, minimally-choreographed version of "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" with my 3 year-old daughter (and newborn baby) as we knock on doors and spread delighted and shocked surprise throughout the land. However, a PLATE of SEVERAL different kinds of cookies is probably not within my reach here on December 18th, as my executive function requires several months ahead of time to get my Certifiably A.D.D. Head around a project like that, and I don't even have the addresses of any of my friends around here anymore. But I knew I had a small project sitting on one of the burners in my mind (probably still accidentally on) that seemed to encompass all my cookie desires this season: Those puffy, super-soft, gorgeously bright, delicious, beloved Sugar Cookies that local neighborhood women become famous for.
I emailed the daughter of MY local neighborhood Best Cookies woman, an old friend from high school whose mother often had gorgeous, huge, super soft, perfect sugar cookies, filled and decorated with bright, teeth-staining pictures made of soft frosting. Everyone lost their minds over these cookies. Thanks be to Facebook messenger, a strange land where no contact for 20 years is a surmountable communication gap to some if random questions or Lularoe parties are involved. Thankfully this friend is on the level of Bought A Baby Shower Gift, so I think I legally have the right to message her at any hour of the day about a recipe. Two days later the recipe for the cookie AND the frosting was sitting in my inbox from her mother herself. YES! I was going to be that mom who makes amazing cookies. The neighborhood children would soon come calling, talking to eachother in the street on their tricycles about how impossibly soft and cakey they are, how perfect and superior the frosting is compared to everyone else's, including their own mother's.
It is tricky to make a delicious frosting when you don't really get what is good about Good Frosting in the first place. Of course my fingers were tingling at the very thought of a project, ready to dive into the google mountain of search results that are rendered from asking the internet about cookies. In my mind I knew I was trying to make that smooth, shiny, hard frosting that makes perfect picture scenes on coffee shop cookies, and I knew from a recent Pioneer Woman episode that it was Royal Icing I was thinking of. So I googled and found several recipes for perfect Christmas cookies, cross-compared it to my Cookie Mom's recipe, and set the burner in my mind to simmer while I waited for the weekend.
During the following days, my husband randomly came home with a tube of sugar cookie dough. After the emotional and physical toll of the practice round for my Thanksgiving Pumpkin Pies, I felt fine with using a pre-made cookie dough, knowing just nailing down a good frosting from scratch was going to surely require several attempts and a few therapy sessions afterward. Someone had given us that dough, and I take it now as a sign from the universe to not overdo it, and to also maybe keep the blog at a decent length. But icing, perfect pools of outlined and filled in icing, sounded like just what the doctor ordered on this warm December Sunday.
Of course we have no effing cookie cutters. And of course I am figuring out how to make weird rectangular cookies look even with a butter knife after they all pooled out flatly into one gigantic rectangle sugar cookie that was hacked beyond repair into squares by my husband. He had helpfully cooked the cookies while I bathed the children as they screamed, unwilling, sloshing pools of water onto my bathroom floor above. It was a deal we struck so he could get frosting, I later learned, by watching him scoop frosting out of the bowl with big pieces of cookie. While unappealing for me, I did see with clarity his end-goals in the process versus mine: FROSTING.
He was a frosting person. Of course! He was in this for the frosting! THAT's why he wanted me to make these so badly. We have only been married for four months, so I don't know a lot of these things yet. I mean, almost everyone is a frosting person that I come across, or at least they are when they see me try to casually smear the frosting off my piece of wedding cake to get to the cake below. That really offends people. Occasionally I find someone else who feels the same as I do about all that gritty lard-paste, but they are usually triathletes. I am a chubby person whose idea of dieting is three meals instead of four, though, so we hate it for different reasons. (I do like whipped cream-based frostings, I should add. Because they are creamy and not gritty! And because they are so much more mild.)
So upon seeing my husband continue to eat the not-remotely finished Royal Icing directly from the bowl, I regretted my choice between the two recently-learned classic cookie icing recipes: Buttercream and Royal. He is going to prefer the Buttercream. It said plainly that the Buttercream had a superior taste and mouthfeel, and It was indeed what Cookie Mom made as well. But I had gone with the Royal in the end for this round (the difference is egg whites instead of butter), because they both taste bad to me, because my stick of butter was still totally hard and all the video people piped the Royal icing slowly and easily out of a ketchup bottle onto their gorgeous holiday cookies, so I knew it couldn't be too hard and the end result would be more impressive. Then we could make artsy little cartoon cookies that could probably be sold at Starbucks, if only all their cookies didn't comes from a warehouse in Oregon (shade).
Your guess about whether or not my royal icing was successful is correct: Once again I nailed it.
Actually, what had had happened was, the frosting never really got to a stiff peak stage at all because of my heckin' hand-cranked food processor. The recipe required me to whip it beyond all energy available. I cranked furiously for ten minutes, then twenty, then more, until both my husband and I were certain there was a mistake either within the recipe, or in its making (the latter was the obvious culprit). I pulled the mixer out of the bowl, with my daughter swaying with mixing fatigue on the counter next to me. We filled three frosting bags and squeezed in old cookie frosting for color, since of course we did not have any food coloring. (Note to self: Fire the help.) At this point, my husband sensed my physical limits and became fully and silently involved from his vulture perch above me, helping me quickly and chaotically form outlines of icing with the overly-runny sauce. We took turns with the leaking zip-lock piping bag. The icing did hold enough to kind-of stay in a very vague shape, and I suspect if I had whipped it for another ten minutes, would have been DIVINELY PERFECT, but we were past the point of all logic by this time and just had to stop.
I immediately felt once again thoroughly grateful to myself for providing this new self-caring practice round. For me, it is such blissful safety to have a Completion Pass Practice Round for an activity that is guaranteed to go wonky at least the first time in my absent-minded professor brain and hands. We laughed and drew obnoxious things, the icing far too crazy for my daughter to attempt using it. I pulled aside one cookie and we decorated with the speed and urgency of an avalanche, and she seemed satisfied. The red and green icing we added to the big batches paled into a strawberry and watermelon color palette. We attempted letters, our names, I thought of the high-end idea of a window (perhaps with a scene inside along the lines of a Bergdorf Goodman holiday display), so we outlined a window, then ran out of Square-Shaped Holiday Things We Knew How To Outline With Leaky Royal Icing and also ran out of cookies.
We waited for it to harden, which seemed to happen almost immediately, and started in with our "filling". Even Alton Brown's plus Nigella Lawson's recipe could not set me up to succeed with Royal Icing that day. It was overly thick and overly runny at the same time, and the outlines had spread until they were as thick as the spaces that needed to be filled. But we were laughing and eating cookies and frosting, so I think I was able to check Family Experience off the list for the day and for the season, flying so high up on my slam-pole-bell-dinger of success that I didn't even need to feel any failure over the practice round. The windows had run into vague Bill-Gates-related shapes, especially when filled in with a big soft pool of runny green and pink icing.
The best part of all was when I brought out a wooden kebab stick with an extremely sharpened end and began drawing designs in borders of the two colors, mixing them artistically the way the expert who came to teach the Pioneer Woman's private class for her friends had raved about. You can make designs in it with a toothpick like so! No. It was already far too hard to mix anything together. We enjoyed a nice big laugh together as a family.
We left the ugly things to cool, knowing that nothing was ever going to save cookies that were forced to be cut into squares when they were supposed to be cut into cute, intricate snowflakes before they were even cooked. These were decorated bottom levels of an Applebees desert. These were not Royal Icing type of cookies, so who cared. We ate them, we learned. I would use the Buttercream Icing recipe of my friend. I would buy cookie cutters at the dollar store after shopping for 4 1/2 hours on Sur la Table's website and reading about Martha Stewart's favorite cookie cutters. I would buy cream of tartar, because that's what makes Those Sugar Cookies into Those Cakey Sugar Cookies, which is an important tip that I want you to remember here, so you can feel you got your money's worth from this post as a Food Blog. Put Tartar In To Make Cakey.
Several hours later I returned home to see that my cookie icing never fully hardened. It was slightly mushy, clearly never brought to the Stiff Peak Climax that it deserved and needed, and because it was not fully able to speak it's needs, I tired from trying to decipher them with no results. The upside to my cookies, I discovered, was that they were heinously delicious. My husband had eaten half of them already, and I plowed through more Frosted Sugar Cookies in one sitting than I ever have in my life, cramming them into my mouth as I stood and watched the Real Housewives of Atlanta well past midnight in my living room (it was a new Sunday night episode, guys). The icing was hard but still soft, the three offensive-tasting ingredients of 2 egg whites, a dash of lemon juice and a mountain of powdered sugar melding into something else entirely, the whole greater than the sum of its parts, the mouthfeel buttery and unctuous and chewy and crumbly and candy-like.
Holy freaking Homemade Love cookie.
A large reason for this experience was of course the store-bought sugar cookie dough, which had spread too thin but was so perfect and chewy that we could not stop eating it. I doubt I could make something chewier and more delicious from scratch. But I originally set out to make cakey cookies anyway, not chewy, so I think I should still try Cookie Mom's recipe this holiday season.. I just need to go to the gol dang store again. (Trying to stop swearing.) And once again, I need a mixer. My husband does not want a standing mixer unless it's a KitchenAid (he has a lot of Virgo qualities like this), so we are in the market for an electric hand-mixer that will be used for the next twenty years. I will always love that hand-crank food processor for saving my family's First Thanksgiving, but I think it's really made for camping.
I finished the practice-round of cookies as I wrote this. For breakfast. I mean I also had milk and coffee, so there was protein. The cookies, like last night, were so, so good. For the first time I finally understand what people like about frosting. These ones were so thin that the frosting was just as thick as the cookie. But somehow it all combined to form something amazing. Frosting: I finally, finally get it. I doubt mine was any good, I think it just makes a difference when you labored for it yourself (my 3 year-old added MANY cups of powdered sugar to the egg whites, ONE tablespoon at a time), and also there is always something to be said for fresh ingredients and no preservatives. Frosted sugar cookies are either hard and angry or soft and glommy and they are always way too sweet and weird-tasting. But the ones my friends' mom made were sitting around the table every holiday, shaped differently depending on the time of year, and if there's one thing I love, it's something FESTIVE. And the cookies we wound up making in our practice round were legitimately delicious. So I know now that I need to build a supply of sprinkles and glitter colors that are appropriate for every occasion, and I will also need to build up the will to do it. But for Christmas? For Christmas we can. I have proved it to myself once again. If Pillsbury dough is allowed, anyway.
Now, just to actually bake and ice a successful cookie! The practice round has been completed, nailed, and eaten with glad tidings. Stay tuned for the epic drama of the Final Sugar Cookie Round. Will they make their way onto a plate of various holiday treats to be flung with surprise into my loved ones' homes? Doubtful!
But maybe?
Makes me wish I was making cookies today with the family and friends.... Instead I was working :/
Me too...how terrible!
Hola @joylion, upv0t3
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