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Hassle-Free Holiday Baking: 6 Easy Days to Perfect Christmas Cookies
by Mimi Cummins
Description: How to make perfect Christmas cookies in six days.
Like many people, I love the idea of making a large assortment of Christmas
cookies during the holidays, but I find it difficult to find the time to get
it done. As a working mother, cookbook author and webmaster of
Christmas-Cookies.com, I am a very busy
woman, but baking Christmas cookies every year is a must. Over the past few
years, out of frustration and necessity, I have developed a system for
organizing my Christmas baking. This system allows me to make a large
variety of holiday treats without taking too much time out of my busy
schedule. By dividing the tasks up into 6 days, I can spend a couple hours
each day getting this done, and on the 7th day, relax and enjoy giving and
eating some delicious Christmas cookies. After all, God rested on the 7th
day! You don’t even have to do this on 6 consecutive days. Most of the steps
can be done days and even weeks in advance, giving you a great head start on
your holidays.
Day 1
Search your books, recipe cards, and favorite Web sites and decide what
recipes to make this year. I usually mix my traditional family recipes with
a few new recipes for variety. 6 to 12 different recipes makes a nice
assortment, depending on how many people you have to feed and how much time
you have to spend baking. Write down the name of each recipe on a piece of
paper, as well as the source of the recipe so that you can look it up later,
such as the Web site URL or page number in a cookbook. Print out the recipes
that you find online, and set aside the books or recipe cards you’ll need so
that you can access them easily on Day 2. Things you may want to consider
when making your selection are:
- difficulty of the recipe if you are a novice cook or will be baking with
children,
- cost of special ingredients such as chocolate or nuts, if you are on a
budget,
- whether the cookies keep well or can they be frozen, if you’d like to do
your baking ahead of time.
Day 2
Consulting your list of recipes, create your shopping list. Calculate
roughly how much of each ingredient you’ll need in total by adding up cups
of butter, number of eggs, and other common ingredients. Include in your
list:
- All of the ingredients for the cookies. Check what you have at home for
freshness. Nuts and shortening will go rancid after a few months, and baking
powder and baking soda lose their effectiveness, so keep this in mind: out
with the old, in with the new! Fresh ingredients are the key to good tasting
cookies.
- Any baking tools you may need. Consider replacing old worn out tools or
adding a new tool to your collection each year.
- Anything you may need for decorating such as food coloring, colored sugars
and jimmies, or pastry bags for piping frosting.
- Containers like plastic tubs, cookie tins, or even cardboard boxes to store
your cookies in. Make sure you have containers that are large enough to hold
a complete batch of each cookie (look at the yield of your recipe if you’re
not sure). If you plan to parcel them out for gift-giving, make sure you
have enough containers for each recipient.
- Organize your shopping list according to store, such as: grocery store,
kitchen or home store, cake decorating supply store, etc.
Day 3
Go shopping! Lay out your plan of action so that you go to the grocery store
last of all, so that you can take your refrigerated ingredients home as soon
as possible. Of course, if you live in a very cold climate, this is not too
much of a worry. When you get home, wash your new baking tools and put all
the non-perishable ingredients in one place so that you can easily get them
out on Day 4. At my house, I have a designated baking cupboard that gives me
easy access to everything I need on days I decide to bake. You can do Day 3
weeks before you plan to bake as long as you:
- Freeze your butter or shortening, and
- buy the perishables such as eggs and cream cheese just before you plan to
bake.
Day 4
Today you will just make the dough for your cookies, but you will not
actually bake them! Most cookie doughs can safely be refrigerated for days
or frozen for weeks before you need to make the cookies. The reason for
doing it this way is because when making several different kinds of cookies
at the same time, it’s very efficient to make all your dough at once while
you have all your ingredients and baking tools at hand. If you do have a
particular recipe that can’t be frozen, identify it and plan to make it on
Day 5.
Remember to bring refrigerated items like butter, eggs, and cream cheese to
room temperature before you start to assemble your recipes. Take them out of
the refrigerator at least a couple hours before you plan to bake.
To make this process even easier, I’ve developed a system for making dough
assembly-line style, which you can read more about in my article about the
Cookie Assembly Line. Wrap each ball
of dough in plastic wrap, identify it by writing the name of the recipe on
the plastic wrap with a felt-tip marker, and refrigerate it or freeze it. If
it is a slice-and-bake refrigerator cookie, form it into a log instead of a
ball, according to the directions in your recipe. Make sure to keep your
recipes in a handy place so that you don’t have to search for them on Day 5.
Day 5
Today is baking day! Check your recipe: if you have to work with dough at
room temperature (as recommended for most cookie press cookies) then take
your dough out ahead of time and let it warm up to room temperature before
you begin forming the cookies. If you have frozen your dough, allow it to
thaw in the plastic wrap and only remove the plastic wrap once it has
reached the desired temperature. If you remove the plastic while it is still
frozen, then condensation will form on the dough and that will add too much
moisture.
Start with the recipes that call for the lowest oven temperature and
pre-heat your oven to that temperature. Remove dough from the refrigerator,
line your baking sheets with parchment paper (no greasing!) and prepare the
dough for baking as called for in your recipe. You may have to roll out the
dough and cut it with cookie cutters, or fill it with some kind of filling,
or place it in a special pan like a mini-muffin pan or a Madeleine mold, or
simply slice and bake the rolls you made on Day 4. Once all the cookies that
are baked at the lowest temperature are completed, raise your oven
temperature to the next highest to bake those cookies, and so on.
Even if you have some of the handy stackable cooling racks, you will surely
run out of space to cool several batches of cookies. Placing a
double-thickness of aluminum foil on your countertop is a good substitute
for a cooling rack when you run out of space. Once your cookies are
completely cooled to room temperature, line your containers with waxed paper
and place your cookies in the containers one layer at a time, with another
sheet of waxed paper in between each layer. Then return the containers to
the refrigerator if they will not be eaten for a day or two, or you can
leave them out at room temperature until the next day. If they won’t be
eaten or shipped for several days, you can wrap the entire container in
plastic wrap and freeze your cookies for up to 2 weeks. You can freeze them
for longer than this if you wrap the cookies in small stacks of 5 or 6
before placing them in their containers. Defrost the cookies at room
temperature, leaving them wrapped until they are thoroughly defrosted.
Many of your recipes may be completed at this point if they don’t require
decorating.
Day 6
Day 6 is decorating day. For many of us, this is the most enjoyable step in
the cookie-baking process. Decorating should always be done no more than 2
days before the cookies will be eaten, ideally the day or even the morning
before. Now you will make your various frostings and icings, or prepare your
melted chocolate for drizzling, or dust with powdered sugar to decorate your
cookies as directed. If your cookies are not to be eaten immediately, make
sure that the icing or melted chocolate has thoroughly set and hardened—a
process that may take several hours—before stacking the cookies back in
their containers, again separating the layers with sheets of waxed paper.
Cookies that have been frosted with a buttercream-type frosting cannot be
stacked. They should be stored in a single layer with a loose covering of
plastic wrap.
Day 7
Relax and enjoy your holiday, because your Christmas baking is done!
Mimi Cummins is co-author of the book "Christmas Cookies Are for Giving:
Recipes, Stories, and Tips for Making Heartwarming Gifts." This book,
"enthusiastically recommended" by Midwest Book Review, is full of baking
tips and hints, including nearly 50 recipes each with a full-color photo.
For more information visit http://www.christmascookiesareforgiving.com/ or
order from your favorite online bookstore.
