My Very Homemade Christmas: Gift Baskets, Sore Muscles, and Sugar Cookies

As you may have noticed, over the holidays, I took an accidental week off from blogging. Things just got too hectic, in part because I decided to make most of my Christmas presents this year. Between baking enough treats to fill four gift baskets for friends and family, helping with my mom's Christmas Day brunch, prepping snacks for house guests, and making my gift for the family bottle exchange, I had quite a week on my hands! I spent a total of fourteen hours in the kitchen by the time Christmas rolled around, and I went through almost five pounds of butter and eight pounds of flour!

For my gift baskets, I made five batches of cinnamon rolls, one recipe of dense chocolate loaf cake, one recipe of banana bread, a double batch of puppy chow, and a double batch of sugar cookies.

Batch #5 of cinnamon rolls!

Puppy chow, tailgate mix, sugar cookies, chocolate loaf, and banana bread, wrapped and ready to go!

 

The treats nestled all snug in their gift baskets!

As tiring as all that baking was (I thought my arms would fall off from the kneading!), I had a great time doing it! And the house smelled fantastic all week long. 

But the best thing about my baking spree was being able to share my favorite recipes with some of my favorite people. The cinnamon rolls are, of course, a slightly modified version of Paula Deen's recipe, and the dense chocolate loaf cake comes from Nigella Lawson's How to Be a Domestic Goddess. 

The banana bread is my Grandma Bill's recipe as it appears in the official Heller-Higgins family cookbook. This is by far my favorite banana bread recipe because it's really more of a banana-flavored cake than a bread--I even use cake flour in the recipe to make it even smoother and cakier! 

But the sugar cookies have to be my favorite recipe. I love frosted sugar cookies, in part because they're such a huge part of my family's holiday traditions. My Grandma Bill always makes a few batches of sugar cookies for Christmas Eve. She also makes something like 300 sugar cookies for my family to frost at Easter time. Some of my favorite childhood memories are of sitting around my grandma's dining room table, surrounded by cousins and aunts and uncles. The table would always be covered with newspaper; mounds of crisp, butter-yellow cookies; crystal mugs brimming with colored frosting and sticky knife handles; and trays of sprinkles in every shape and color imaginable. We would all end up with sticky fingers, clothes speckled with multicolored frosting stains, and wildly colored plates stacked with fresh sugar cookies! 

This Christmas, I got to bake my two batches of sugar cookies with the help of my youngest cousins Tucker, Zoe, and Augie. Zoe helped me roll out and shape the cookies, and all three of the kids helped me frost. We had flour all over the kitchen floor and frosting splattered four feet away from our frosting station, but, heck, any mess is worth baggies full of soft, powdery, sugary, colorful goodness, right?

A gift baggie of sugar cookies.

My sugar cookie recipe is a little different from my Grandma Bill's, however. My recipe of choice combines my Aunt Rita's Sugar Cookie recipe with Nigella Lawson's Butter Cut-Out Cookie recipe. The two original recipes are very similar, but their proportions differ slightly: Aunt Rita's recipe calls for more sugar, more fat, and shortening instead of butter, while Lawson's recipe calls for real unsalted butter, less sugar, and cake flour for added softness. 

I think that my combined recipe takes the best parts of both recipes. And instead of Lawson's hot water and powdered sugar frosting, I use my mom's favorite frosting: a tiny bit of softened butter, a hearty splash of vanilla, a slosh of 1% milk, and a whole lot of powdered sugar. 

This, I believe, creates the perfect sugar cookie: it's soft and pale and powdery, yet crisp at the edges and sturdy enough for rough treatment. And they improve after a day or two of sitting out. As the cookie absorbs the frosting's moisture, the cookie becomes moist and tender while the frosting hardens to form a rich, sugary, delectable crust.

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Lesley's Hybrid Sugar Cookies
Adapted from Nigella Lawson's Butter Cut-Out Cookies and Aunt Rita's Sugar Cookies

Cookie Ingredients

• 3/4 cup softened unsalted butter
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 large eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 1/3 cups cake flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt

Frosting Ingredients

• 2 tablespoons softened salted butter
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup milk
• 2 to 3 cups powdered sugar

Directions

Combine flours, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl. Whisk together to combine.

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar together until pale. Beat in eggs and vanilla. Add the dry ingredient mixture and beat until smooth. If possible, refrigerate dough for one hour.

Roll out the dough on a floured counter top until the dough is approximately 1/4 inch thick. Cut into shapes with cookie cutters and bake on ungreased cookie sheets at 360 degrees for 8 to 10 minutes (or until the edges are very slightly browned). Allow cookies to set on the cookie sheet before moving them onto cooling racks.

While the cookies cool, begin the frosting by briefly whipping the softened butter with a fork or whisk. Add vanilla extract and a splash of milk. Add two cups of the powdered sugar and mix until smooth. Use the fork or whisk to smooth out any persistent chunks of butter.

Once the mixture is smooth, add more sugar or milk as needed to reach a slightly watery yet spreadable consistency. Spread the frosting onto cooled cookies with a knife.