In the midst of all this stress, my department was responsible for our company's monthly team building lunch. It had been a rough week - we are finalizing renewals and trying to plan for for the coming year, dealing with lots of changes, and my boss was put through the wringer dealing with one particularly nasty individual. So we decided to go all out and do a full on Christmas dinner with ham, green bean casserole, cheesy potatoes, mac & cheese, rolls, pies, and (my contribution) a frost your own cookie bar! It was a ton of work, but in the end, it reminded us all of why we love working together. We had so much fun planning and cooking as a team, enjoying a couple minutes where we could stop worrying about who was on the other end of the ringing phones and focus on our friendships in the office, and then spending the rest of the day in a total food coma before pulling the leftovers out for a late afternoon snack. This one little event completely put me back into the Christmas mood, so today I'm sharing my Christmas cookie and frosting recipes with you, in the hope that you'll gather up your family and friends and spend an afternoon focusing on the things that truly matter in life :)
Mama K's Cut-Out Christmas Cookies
Ingredients:
5.5 cups all-purpose flour2 T baking powder
2 tsp salt
2 cup sugar
1.5 cups (3 sticks) margarine
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
Preparation Directions:
1. Mix flour, baking powder, and salt in a medium bowl.
2. Cream softened margarine, about 2 minutes.
3. And sugar and beat about 2 minutes.
4. Beat in eggs and vanilla one at a time, until well mixed.
5. Add flour mixture to butter mixture in three sections, each time mixing until just combined.
6. Form dough into a ball and wrap in wax paper. Chill overnight, or at least several hours. If you are only chilling for a few hours, I recommend forming the dough into two balls and wrapping each separately.
When you are ready to cut out your cookies:
1. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
2. Line your counter with wax paper, and sprinkle liberally with flour.
3. Grab a quarter of your dough and roll into a circle using a rolling pin. Depending on how sticky your dough is, you may need to pat flour onto the dough or your rolling pin. Be careful not to use too much flour! I like to make a combination of thick and thin cookies, so sometimes I roll my dough to be 1/4 inch thick (for thicker cookies) and other times I made it about 1/8 inch thick (for thin cookies.)
4. Dip your cookie cutters in flour to make it easier to remove your cookies from the cutters and press the cutter firmly into the dough. Wiggle the cutter back and forth several times. Place the cookie on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.
5. Continue cutting out cookies until you run out of dough. Grab the leftover pieces of dough and combine them with another quarter of the reserved dough. Repeat steps 1-5 until all your dough has been used. I can usually get about 75 small cookies cut out, you may get less if you use bigger cutters.
6. Bake your cookies in the oven until the edges are just turning golden brown. This generally takes 6-10 minutes. My thinnest cookies took about 7 minutes, while my thickest cookies took almost 10. I set my oven timer to 7 minutes for each batch and watched them like a hawk :)
7. Let cookies cool on the cookie sheet for 1-2 minutes before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely. When cool, they are ready to frost (recipe below) and decorate!
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| My recipe book, ball of chilled dough, and SPRINKLES! |
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| Rolled out dough. I probably don't have enough flour on the wax paper here. You need just enough to keep the dough from sticking to the wax paper and ruining the cut out when you try to pick it up. |
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| Using cookie cutters to cut out the cookies. I found these at Target for less than $10. |
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| Repeating, over and over! |
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| Cut outs on a cookie sheet. |
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| Cut out star cookies waiting for the oven. The stars were rolled out pretty thick and they ended up puffing up during baking. If you're making thick cookies, you may want to space them out just a little bit more than I did. |
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| Cookies cooling on a wire rack. Notice they are just barely browning at the edges. They'll get crispy if you bake them much longer! |
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| The full operation. My kitchen was covered in flour! |
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| Pink Christmas Doggie decided to help me celebrate cookie making with some bubbly wine! |
Butter Cream Frosting
Ingredients:
1 lb (4.5 cups sifted) confectioners sugar
0.5 cup (1 stick) margarine
1 tsp vanilla
3 T milk
Preparation Instructions:
1. Soften margarine in the microwave. 2. Beat together sugar, margarine, vanilla, and milk until smooth.
3. Add small amounts of milk until desired consistency is reached.
4. Divide frosting into as many bowls as wanted. Add food coloring, flavoring extracts, etc to each to make different types of frosting. I usually like at least one bowl of red, one of green, and one white bowl of frosting for Christmas cookies. I generally flavor my white frosting with peppermint extract. You'll probably need 10-20 drops of food coloring for each bowl, but start with just a few and add more until you get the color you desire. If you want to make chocolate frosting, add 2 T unsweetened cocoa and 3/4 cup melted semi-sweet chocolate chips to white frosting and blend well. I have trouble with my chocolate frosting being hard to spread, so I usually microwave it for 30 seconds right before using it.
5. Frost and decorate your cookies! Frosting will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator, if needed.
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| My four kinds of frosting - red, green, white peppermint, and chocolate. (note: this is two batches of the above recipe. It frosted 250 cookies and I still have frosting left over!) |
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| Crushed candy canes for decorations. Question - Is my family the only one that has a "kitchen hammer" used for doing things l like crushing candy canes? |
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| I go overboard on decorations :0 Here I have all kinds of sprinkles, mini m&ms, holiday chocolate chips, crushed candy canes, and crushed Andes mints. |
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| The finished product! |
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