Holiday Cookie Projects: Snowflakes, Dreidel Trios, and Ornaments
Holiday Cookie Projects: Snowflakes, Dreidel Trios, and Ornaments is a dessert that serves 24. This recipe covers 3% of your daily requirements of vitamins and minerals. One serving contains 306 calories, 2g of protein, and 8g of fat. From preparation to the plate, this recipe takes roughly 2 hours and 15 minutes. Head to the store and pick up brown sugar, ground cinnamon, confectioners' sugar, and a few other things to make it today.
Instructions
Cream the butter in a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment (or using a hand mixer) until smooth.
Add the molasses and vanilla and mix. Sift the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and cloves together. Working in batches, and mixing just until combined after each addition, add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar mixture. Shape the dough into a thick disk, wrap in waxed paper, and refrigerate 1 to 2 hours.
Heat the oven to 350 degrees F. Grease 1 or 2 sheet pans. On a lightly floured surface, roll the dough out 1/4-inch thick.
Stir the confectioners' sugar, milk, and vanilla together until smooth.
Use a snowflake-shaped cookie cutter to cut out the cookies, rerolling the scraps as needed. If you plan to hang the cookies, use a toothpick to make the holes in the dough about 1/8-inch wide, keeping in mind that the holes will shrink as the cookies bake.
Bake until firm, 12 to 15 minutes, and let cool on the pan. Using only white icing and a pastry bag fitted with the smallest plain tip, pipe thin lines from the center of the cookie out to the points, like spokes of a wheel. Connect the spokes with thin lines in between them, making a spiderweb effect to make it look like a snowflake.
Let the icing harden before threading the cookies onto wire, string or yarn for hanging.
Use a dreidel cookie cutter and cut out 3 cookies.
Lay 1 on a greased sheet pan. Fanning out at an angle, with the handles overlapping at the top, lay 2 more dreidels next to the first one (it will look like a paper-doll effect). The handle is now 3 layers thick; press on it gently to thin it slightly and make it larger. Repeat with the remaining dough, rerolling the scraps as needed. If you plan to hang the cookies, use a toothpick to make a hole in the handle about 1/8-inch wide, keeping in mind that the hole will shrink as the cookies bake.
Bake until firm, 12 to 15 minutes, and let cool on the pan. Color some of your icing blue with food coloring, or use blue colored sugar and white icing together. Using a pastry bag fitted with a small plain tip, pipe Hebrew letters or stars of David on the cookies' faces.
Sprinkle the sugar on the icing while the icing is still wet.
Let the icing harden before threading the cookies onto wire, string, or yarn for hanging.
Use any holiday-themed cookie cutter to cut out the cookies, rerolling the scraps as needed. If you plan to hang the cookies, use a toothpick to make holes in the dough about 1/8 inch wide, keeping in mind that the holes will shrink as the cookies bake.
Bake until firm, 12 to 15 minutes, and let cool on the pan. Meanwhile, color some of your icing in festive colors with food coloring, or use colored sugars. Using a pastry bag fitted with the smallest plain tip, pipe a few colorful borders and decorations on the cookies. When set, add more lines of icing in white.
Let the icing harden before threading the cookies onto wire, string, or yarn for hanging.
Recommended wine: Cream Sherry, Madeira, Prosecco
Cream Sherry, Madeira, and Prosecco are great choices for Cookies. Sweet bubbly Prosecco doesn't overwhelm simple sugar or shortbread cookies, a sweet cream sherry complements spiced cookies, and madeira's nutty notes match cookies with nuts perfectly. You could try NV Johnson Estate Cream Sherry. Reviewers quite like it with a 5 out of 5 star rating and a price of about 19 dollars per bottle.
NV Johnson Estate Cream Sherry
Very aromatic with notes of hazelnut, vanilla, and a touch of oak followed by sweet raisins and a touch of yeast. Clean lasting finish. Good now but will reward those allow it to age"". A favorite pre-prandial beverage. Consider it with nuts before dinner as an aperitif, or after dinner with dessert, especially chocolates and fruit-based desserts. Also wonderful on cold afternoons, served with biscotti to dip in ""Italian-style"". "