"sugar cookies" news and stories

Gail Gibbons' book Things To Make and Do For Halloween has been a constant in my life since I was in kindergarten. My mother picked it up at a thrift store when I was four years old, in the hopes that it would provide my sister and me with a few fun Halloween-themed activities. I think it goes to show how much we both loved it that I still have it in my book collection.

It's a book that combines food and craft activities, including how to make a Halloween mask, how to make a pointy witch hat and a recipes for Halloween treats. When I was younger, I'd start to pull this book of the shelf sometime in August and badger my mom until she relented and let us make the cookie recipe on page 34.

It's just a standard sugar cookie recipe, written to include the correct number of food coloring drops to make the dough a bright orange. Just before baking, you use small chocolate chips to create a mouth, nose and eyes and poof, jack o' lantern cookies! It's an easy recipe to whip together and the decorating step is simple enough that even the youngest kids can play along. Check out the recipe after the jump.

At Eleni's NY, you can get these polished, super-posh iced sugar cookies that look so cute, you'll want to just sit and admire them instead of stuffing them in your mouth. (And rightly so: 16 will set you back $60, not including shipping and handling. That's $3.75 a cookie, folks). They're a perfect solution to your lack of romantic poetry skills.

If you're not so into the love notes, you can go the traditional route with Eleni's hearts, love birds, or "prince charming" frogs, which are all just as cute (and just as expensive). The bakery also specializes in cupcakes and brownies, so browse the site to your heart's (and stomach's) content.

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When I was a kid, my dad had a music production and distribution company. One of his business partners was a woman named Eleanor and every year she would have a holiday cookie baking and decorating party. My sister and I would go over to her house some Saturday afternoon in early December and join Eleanor's kids around her dining room table, rolling, cutting and decorating our weight in cookies (we also ate quite a few).

It's been nearly twenty years since I made cookies with them, but I still have fond memories of those Saturday afternoons in early December. I also have very fond feelings towards this recipe, because it is tasty and fool-proof. Like the gingerbread recipe I posted yesterday, this dough keeps in the fridge for up to a week, so you can mix up a big batch and bake them off through the holidays. This is also another one that you can either decorate prior to baking or frost with a simple powdered sugar frosting after they've baked (which is what I did in the picture above).

There are very few activities that you can do that are as good as making cookies. Maybe playing a favorite sport or listening to your favorite CD or maybe even sex. But there's just something special about making homemade cookies.

Today is Homemade Cookies Day, which means if you go to the store and buy anything in a package the food police will come to your home and slap the handcuffs on you.

This is where I usually link to various recipes, but have you seen how many cookie recipes there are on the web? 94 trillion (I counted). So I'll link to a bunch of collections at various sites, such as AllRecipes, Food Network, Joy of Baking, and Kraft Foods.

This page dedicated to National Sugar Cookie Day starts by saying that today is "a day to satisfy your sweet tooth." Hey, sounds like every Monday to me!

But let's make some sugar cookies today. I think that sugar cookies are sometimes taken for granted, because people see them as "plain" or "basic." But there's something so simple and nice about the taste of a sugar cookie. Even the name tells you what you're going to get. Everyone who cooks should know how to bake a good one.

Here's a recipe for sugar cookies, and here's one for Cotton Candy Sugar Cookies. AllRecipes has one for Cookie Jar Sugar Cookies.