Mystery Lovers' Kitchen: International cookie day

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Around the Kitchen Table: Holiday Cookies! + 6-Book #Giveaway

LUCY BURDETTE: As I was wondering about the best topic for around the kitchen table this holiday month, Leslie B reminded me that today is international cookie day. So how could we talk about anything but cookies? What are your favorites? What are the ones your family can’t do without? What will never ever appear on your table? Any new holiday cookies on the horizon?

For me, Christmas is all about the sugar cookies. Preferably decorated with colored icing and sprinkles. Here’s the recipe for my sugar cookies Key West style.

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LESLIE BUDEWITZ: My late mother was known all through the neighborhood for her plates of Christmas cookies: spritz, date pinwheels, bourbon balls, Berlinkranzer---I could go on, but you get the idea! When I wrote As the Christmas Cookie Crumbles, the 5th Food Lovers' Village Mystery, which features a cookie exchange, I gave her recipe for Russian teacakes, aka Mexican Wedding Cakes and Snowballs, to the murder victim, with the "state of the cookie" a clue to the time of death and the killer. (Shared here from a previous National Cookie Day.) And in Peppermint Barked, the 6th Spice Shop Mystery, Pepper and the crew have a friendly "bark off," and the staff's least experienced cook and baker brings in Candy Cane Cookies worthy of my mother. (Mine tend to look like pipe cleaners with a hangover. Of course, they looked beautiful when our blogger-writer pal Kim Davis made them, from my mother's recipe.) The favorite in our household? Probably these Christmas Crinkle Cookies, with a touch of espresso powder giving an extra richness to the chocolate. And a penguin plate for an extra dose of cute!

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MADDIE DAY: Ah, cookies, how I love you. My mom always made five or six kinds of cookies for the holiday, the recipes for which I've included in several of my books. Like Leslie, every year I make what we call Mexican Bridecakes (hint: they're the easiest because no rolling and cutting is involved). My version of that recipe was in Christmas Cocoa and a Corpse. I shared the holly cookies from Candy Slain Murder here, which is just my mom's English Butter Cookies recipe cut into holly shapes and sprinkled with green sugars. (No frosting, please!) And my most recent holiday recipe was included in "Scarfed Down" in Christmas Scarf Murder.

Photograph by Kim Davis

The talented Kim Davis made up the recipe for turtle cookies (which copy turtle candies, with chocolate, nuts, and caramel) and, as usual, she takes great food pictures!

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MOLLY MacRAE: Such fond memories of baking Christmas cookies with my mother and brothers! What a mess we must have made decorating spritz and cut out sugar cookies! We sprinkled colored sugar and nonpareils with abandon. Our favorites, though, were the silver dragees. Apparently the FDA considers them unsafe to eat. Who knew? Ah well. We made dozens and dozens of cookies (so we could eat them) and so we could carry plates to the neighbors. My boys and I had fun carrying on the tradition, adding new cookies and other treats each year. One year we made the beurre & sel jammers you see below. They were stunning and delicious and we haven't made them since. I wonder why? No matter. I'll make them sometime in the next week or two and post the recipe here in the kitchen on December 10th.

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VICKI DELANY: I'm a big cookie maker. I love making cookies, but these days, because my children are all adults, I don't make them nearly as much as I'd like to - I mean, I can eat them all, but should I? So Christmas is when I come into my own. I've even been known to take containers to my neighbours. I shared this recipe a number of years ago with MLK and here's the link again. This is a family favourite; cookies my mom used to make every year. She's still with us, but not baking so I've taken them on. The dough is a lot like shortbread, with red and green cherries added for holiday colour.

Mystery Lovers' Kitchen: stained glass cookie recipe
(mysteryloverskitchen.com)

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TINA KASHIAN: I love cookies, but I’m not a baker. I’m a cook. But I do love a good cookie! Every holiday, I’m invited to a cookie exchange for a group of mothers. I always stress about this until I found a recipe for chocolate crinkle cookies. With help from my youngest teenage daughter, we made these chocolate cookie crinkles and they were delicious. I will be baking them again this year. I shared the recipe at MLK here: Happy Holidays!

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PEG COCHRAN/MARGARET LOUDON: My mother-in-law was the queen of cookies at Christmas time. She made cookie nests, vanilla kifle (small balls of butter, flour, sugar and finely ground nuts rolled in confectioners sugar,) Layered Pita (yeasty dough with sugar mixed with ground walnuts and apricot jam between the many layers and cut into diamond shapes) and more. I don't make a lot of cookies but I do make sugar cookies with my granddaughter. And this year I might make Shrewsbury biscuits, a cookie found in English tea shops like the one in my Open Book Series.

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MAYA CORRIGAN: Baking cookies was one of our holiday traditions as long as I can remember. The staples on our cookie tray were Mexican wedding cakes, hazelnut crescents, and angel slices (a layered bar cookie from a recipe in Joy of Cooking). Though we had our favorites, each year I tried making at least one new cookie, and if everyone liked it, it showed up every year after that. I shared a recipe for caramel almond cookies, which joined the list of must-have treats for the holidays a few years ago. With only five ingredients, they're easy to make.

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LESLIE KARST: In our house when I was growing up, "Christmas cookies" meant my grandmother's sugar cookies in the shape of the myriad cookie cutters my mother had. Mom would make several batches each year, then all us kids (and Mom) would sit around the table and decorate them with different colors of sugar icing, as well as sprinkles and silver balls. As we got older, us kids got more "creative" with the cookie cutter shapes, transforming the angels and reindeer into things such as Martians and zebras.

I recently made a batch of Christmas cookies--after a hiatus of many years--using a set of cookie cutters I purchased in Anchorage, Alaska, of a dog sled team and musher. I guess I'm getting old and nostalgic, because I stuck with the actual shapes. They were simply too adorable to mess with! (Okay, so maybe I did make my mushers into Santa Claus....)

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CLEO COYLE: I LOVE Christmas Cookies! When I was a little girl, I couldn't wait to help my Aunt Mary make them in our kitchen every December. (She was born in Italy and lived with our family, making her more of a grandmother, really.) Aunt Mary is gone now, but I still have her crinkle dough cutter she brought with her from Italy. She did not live to see the publication of my first culinary mystery, but I know she would have been tickled. And it's largely because of those influential years, acting as her little helper in the kitchen, that I've enjoyed sharing so many recipes with my ☕ Coffeehouse Mystery readers (and all of you here at Mystery Lovers' Kitchen), including my version of Aunt Mary's GLAZED ITALIAN LEMON COOKIES (aka "Anginetti," pictured below) and her ITALIAN BOW TIE COOKIES (aka Angel Wings)....

Click the photo for Cleo's recipe.

My husband (and partner in crime writing) and I love to cook (and eat!), which is why we enjoy experimenting with classic recipes, too, creating tasty twists for our readers. One of our favorite classic Christmas cookies served as the inspiration for the next recipe, which we published in our 14th Coffeehouse Mystery, Once Upon a Grind. Click the photo below for our "Coffeehouse" version of Christmas Gingerbread...

Click the photo for Cleo's recipe.

These ICED GINGERBREAD COOKIE STICKS are a fun and elegant way to serve gingerbread on dessert trays or after dinner with coffee, tea, or cocoa since they also double as drink stirrers. Click the photo (above) for the recipe, and Happy Holidays, everyone! ☕

GIVEAWAY!