Rolling Out the Holiday Cookies

The holidays are rolling around, so I thought this year I'd post a few cookie recipes. Although, if I’m honest, this idea has been rattling around in my brain for awhile now, and I just needed an excuse to make them. Back at Halloween, we got ‘booed’. If you’re not familiar with this, basically, an anonymous neighbor gives you a bag of treats, and then you pay it forward to two other people in the neighborhood who haven’t yet received one. Well, I decided to get my two people a loaf of Pumpkin bread from a local bakery. I placed the order for the two loaves at the drive thru, and the girl asked, “Would you like to try our new snickerdoodle bars?” Um, yes please. Well, when I got home, I discovered she had actually said snickerdoodle bread, and unfortunately, it wasn’t nearly as good as that sounds. It got me thinking, though. How could I do a new spin on snickerdoodles? Cinnamon Roll Cookies, of course!

Here’s what you’ll need for the dough: 

• 1 cup butter (2 sticks)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 Tablespoon vanilla
• 1 egg
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 5 ½ cups flour 

For the filling: 

• 2 Tablespoons melted butter
• ½ cup sugar
• 2 teaspoons cinnamon
• Pinch of salt 

For the icing: 

• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 2 ½ - 3 teaspoons water 

I have to give credit for this cookie dough recipe to the lovely ladies over at Two Sisters Crafting. After searching for a cookie that had all the characteristics I wanted, easy to roll out, not a lot of spreading, soft texture, etc., theirs seemed to fit the bill.  I halved the recipe and followed it almost to the letter. The only change I made was to cut back the amount of flour a little, and you’ll see why.

For your ingredients, you want the egg to be room temperature, but the butter should be a little on the cool side. Depending on the temperature in your house, give it maybe an hour or two out of the fridge. You should be able to press a dent in it with your thumb fairly easily, but the rest of the stick should hold its shape.

Drop two of those into the bowl of your mixer.

When the butter is still a bit on the firm side, I like to give it a little smash, just to help the mixer out. (What? I know it’s a heavy duty Kitchen Aid mixer, and can surely handle a little butter without my help, but I tend to baby my equipment slightly. That thing has put in a lot of work over the past fifteen years, so it's the least I can do.)

Until the butter softens up a little bit more, it will tend to stick to the paddle. Just stop frequently and scrape it out with a silicone spatula.

Once it’s not quite so clingy, go ahead and add the sugar.

Mix just until they’re combined. I know, usually cookie recipes call for creaming the butter and sugar for at least a minute or two, but the Two Sisters said otherwise, so I did as I was told… skeptically… but I still did it.

Next, add the vanilla and egg.

Mix just until they’re incorporated. Add the flour and baking powder.

Once again, mix just until everything is combined. At this point, I realized this dough was going to be a little bit dry for my purposes. Not only do you need a dough that you can roll out, but then it needs to also be rolled up, and this dough was going to crack.

Using the 5 ½ cups I’ve called for, you probably won’t run into this problem, but if you do, this is where the sisters and I part company. They recommend adding more vanilla or a little milk to the mixture. The problem is, even a little bit of milk can change the texture and make the cookies a little more cakey. For regular sugar cookies, that’s not a big deal, but for this particular application, I opted to use 2 Tablespoons of half melted butter instead.

Once that was incorporated the dough was perfect.

Because the dough can’t really afford to add more flour, we’re going to roll it on parchment. Always start with a shape resembling what you want to end up with in the end. In this case, you want something square/rectangular.

Unfortunately, the parchment will slide around while you’re rolling and I don’t really have any cool tricks for preventing that. Please let me know if you do. The secret to keeping a square shape, however, is to always roll towards the corners. As long as you do that, it will stay rectangular. See? 

You want it to be about ¼ inch thick.

In a small container with a lid, combine ½ cup sugar, 2 teaspoons cinnamon, and a pinch of salt.

Put the lid on and shake until everything is combined.

Brush the dough with two tablespoons of melted butter.

Unlike bread cinnamon rolls, you want to cover the entire surface. Butter acts like glue for cookies, while it does the opposite for bread.

Sprinkle the cinnamon mixture over the top, leaving about an inch bare along the far edge. I only used like ⅔ of mine.

Now comes the trickiest part. Carefully fold the edge nearest you over the dough. It will crack a bit, but just fix it with your fingers.

Then, using the parchment, slowly roll the dough. I’ll admit, this is easier said than done, but just be patient.

When you get to this point, fold the last few inches over the top.

Then gently press the seam together with your fingers.

Roll the whole thing up in the parchment.

Then wrap it in plastic and refrigerate for at least an hour, anything longer than that is fine, as well.

When you’re ready, preheat your oven to 350°. Remove the cookie roll from the fridge and unwrap it.

Slice the log into ½ slices and lay them on a parchment lined cookie sheet. Leave at least an inch between them. This picture is not actually of the pan I was cooking, but of the pan I was going to freeze, so I didn’t leave much room. That being said, if you don’t want to bake them all now, like most other cookies, you can place the ready to bake dough on a parchment lined pan and freeze them. When they’re frozen, just place them in a freezer bag and bake as many or as few as you want. Just add 2 minutes to the baking time.

Now, place the ones you are baking now into the 350° oven for 8 – 10 minutes. When they’re ready, they won’t be browned, but they’ll be slightly puffy, they’ll look dry on top, and they might have a few little cracks around the edges.

Allow them to cool on the pan for 5 minutes before moving them, parchment and all, to a cooling rack. When they’ve cooled completely, it’s time to make the icing. Sift 1 cup of powdered sugar into a bowl. Add 2 ½ teaspoons of water and stir until it’s incorporated. It will be fairly thick, but if it’s hard to stir, go ahead and add another ½ teaspoon of water.

Pour/scrape the icing into a plastic bag (zip top, sandwich, piping, any of them will work)

Cut off the very tip and squeeze the icing over the cookies in a zigzag, drizzle like pattern.

And there you have it. Cinnamon Roll Cookies. Aren’t they just the cutest things? These cookies are actually even better the next day, so once the icing is set, and you’ve had a chance to enjoy one, move the rest to an airtight container.

So it turns out the sisters were right. The texture of these cookies was exactly what I was hoping for. So thank you, Two Sisters Crafting! 

What is your favorite holiday cookie?

Cookies on Demand - Summer Reruns

** Remember when you were a kid and over the summer the only thing on tv was reruns of shows you watched last fall? Welcome to the blog version.**

Refrigerator Cookies: Despite the name, you still need to bake them.

It’s bloody fucking hot in here, but I really wanted to make cookies. And the no bake sort are good for warm days, but I really wanted to try some kind of creamsicle approximation for Lyra Marlowe. I just couldn’t figure how to do that without turning on the oven. Next week though, you’re getting no bake. Freaking srsly.

I may still breakdown and buy myself an air conditioner, but really, it’s probably only 30 degrees in here (Celsius people, if it was 30 F this would be a whole other bitch) and I’m almost getting used to it. Besides I’m pretty sure my neighbours are appreciating the show. As if you wouldn’t be wandering around in skin only with this much heat and no AC.

So, rather than bake at night after the building has had all day to soak up the heat, I decided to bake first thing in the morning and give the building a head start in its heating up. I put the dough together the night before, then baked while I drank coffee, and then I glazed them in the evening. Of course, by then it was meltingly hot in here again, so I had to take the vodka out of the freezer to make room for them while the glaze hardened.

The morning baking wasn’t too bad an idea. And I set a pot of cold water over the burner where the oven vent is. Changed it every batch, and it seemed to make a decent heat sink. Had to keep the lid on though. I don’t need more humidity in here either…

Yeah, yeah, I’ll quit bitching and get to the goodies.

Creamsicle Refridgerator Cookies

What you need

Super Vanilla-y Cookie “Filling”

1 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 egg

1 ½ tsp pure vanilla extract

2 ½ c flour

½ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

OMG Orange-y Coating

2 ½ c icing sugar

1 orange

What you gotta do:

As with all cookies, have everything at room temperature, and start by creaming the butter and sugar until they’re nice and fluffy.

Add the egg and vanilla, and keep mixing. Yup, it’s a lot of vanilla, and yup, it has to be real. I’d like to try this again with vanilla beans (and maybe vanilla sugar too) in place of the extract to see if the flavour is quite the same. If you give it a shot, let me know how it works, k?

Rather than sifting flour, I scoop up a cup and sprinkle it down into the bag a few times. This lightens the flour without dirtying a sieve and or second bowl.

Pile in the flour, and sprinkle the baking powder and salt over top.

Give the dry stuff a bit of a mix of its own before starting to stir it into the butter.

Just keep stirring, just keep stirring….

The dough will be very soft but not sticky. Eventually it’ll pull all the flour off the sides of the bowl and start forming a ball. Let it. Help it.

Split the ball into 2 or three chunks and put them on plastic wrap.

I tried using parchment paper, but it didn’t work. It’s too stiff and it doesn’t stick to itself. Plastic wrap worked much better.

Plop the chunks down in the middle, elongate them, roll the plastic wrap around them, and roll and stroke them into nice long sausage like shapes. If you want your sausage longer, hold the wrap at one end, wrap your hand around the base and draw your hand with constant pressure along the length. No really. Do it. Totally works for making sausages longer.

Once you’ve got the dough sausages to your desired length and thickness, twist the ends of the plastic and put them in the fridge.

If you’re really that concerned about having perfectly round cookies, roll the sausages every hour or so. But if your special brand of OCD doesn’t show up in cookie shape, ignore them for a few hours or days.

When you get around to baking, preheat the oven to 375, line a baking sheet with parchment, and slice the logs to about ¼ inch thick.

They don’t spread much so you can fit quite a few on a cookie sheet. The more you can get in the oven at once, the less time the oven has to be on, heating your tiny humid apartment.

Bake them for no more than 10 minutes. Don’t let them get too brown on the bottom. They’re meant to look like the vanilla ice cream inside the creamsicle, not dolce de leche… hm…

Right, vanilla. Take them off the pan as soon as you can, and let them cool on a wire rack. Look! I gots me a shiney new wire rack! (damn thing doesn’t fit in the sink though).

Once they’re cool, you can eat them as is. You’ll totally want to because the whole place will have a fabulous vanilla smell. Or, you can turn them into creamsicles!

Zest an orange and finely mince the zest. (a word that is both noun and verb! Fun!) Combine it and the powdered sugar in a bowl.

Juice the orange. (juice! Another one! What is it about citrus fruit that makes it so nouny and verby?). Yeah, could totally do with Taneasha's awesome citrus juicing apparatus.

Add the juice to the sugar in small amounts,

stirring well each time.

I really do this by look and feel, and it's something that can be easily adjusted if you go too far in one direction or the other, but in total, I used less than ¼ cup to get a glaze that was reasonably runny, but not too watery.

Pour the glaze over the cookies, letting it drip down the sides. Oh, make sure you’ve got parchment under them to catch the drips.

Once you’ve poured all the glaze on and let it drip for a bit, move the rack onto another sheet of parchment and scrape the glaze drips off the first one.

Use the drips to (mostly) fill in (most of) the last of the unglazed areas.

If you want the glaze to set quickly, put the whole rack in the freezer for about 15 minutes.

Keep them refridgerated if it’s so hot in your apartment that you work up a sweat just combing your hair.

Take them to work where it’s nice and air conditioned. If it weren’t for school, I’d be doing a ton of overtime in my nice air conditioned office. Hell, even the trailer at the job site has air conditioning!

What do you do to beat the heat?

**this was originally posted in the summer of 2012, but it's late, I'm tired, and I've actually run out of sugar**

Update on Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 4:38PM by Seeley deBorn

Wow, did they ever love them. These got an even better response than the Black Forest Cookies.

One of the guys said they're the perfect summer cookie. Light, not too sweet, with a refreshing bite of citrus. I might have to try these again with a lime topping....