These days I love both apricots and prunes but tend to make only the apricot cookies since they have the greatest crowd appeal.įinally, I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I have long had a weakness for those unbaked rum-ball-style cookies made from a base of commercial vanilla wafer crumbs. Since some family members were squeamish about prunes, the prune cookies were always made in a cylindrical shape and the apricot ones in a triangular shape so everyone could tell the difference. When I was growing up in Connecticut, no Christmas was ever complete without a pretty passed glass tray of my Polish grandmother’s Cream Cheese Cookies filled with purées of dried apricots and prunes. Topping this list are Orange Shortbread Cookies, a not terribly fancy cut-out cookie yet with rich and buttery flavors of brown sugar and orange zest that I personally find irresistible. Rather, I decided if I were in fact to devote considerable time to baking and throw caloric cares to the wind, I was going to make three of my all-time favorite Christmas cookie recipes. Nor did another publication’s piece on “Crazy-Easy Christmas Cookies” excite my palate. Indeed, I found I had no desire whatsoever to enter Fine Cooking magazine’s 2011 “Big-Batch Cookie Contest” by coming up with some sort of new-fangled slice-and-bake cookie dough that would yield eight dozen or more identical cookies. After perusing all the holiday cookie articles in newspapers and the latest food magazines, however, I came to the conclusion that the Christmas cookies I really craved were the ones I used to make years ago. When you make your living in the food business, there’s unspoken pressure to keep up with the latest trends and always to be trying something new. Now that my son is away at his first year of boarding school and I spend far less time chauffeuring him around to various athletic activities and teen events, I have vowed to return to baking select batches of Christmas cookies in time for Christmas. Once I became a mother and got caught up in the whole Santa Claus routine followed by involvement in various school-sponsored holiday fairs, my baking time suffered and I was lucky if I finally managed to bake a batch or two of Christmas cookies the day after Christmas. I was living alone in Tom Nevers and my entire upside-down house was often dotted with racks of cooling or just-decorated cookies. Many years ago, I used to spend almost the entire month of December baking Christmas cookies to share with family and friends. This "Feasting on the Faraway Island" column first appeared in the Dec.
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