Christmas 2008

I came across a Christmas cookie decorating kit in Williams-Sonoma one year and have been hooked (once a year) ever since. A hefty red box containing the prettiest jars of as many colored sugars, holiday sprinkles, and icing dyes as one could want--and then, even better, an instructional booklet with pictures of the most frighteningly perfect cookies you will ever see. How many people are really going to take tweezers to place each tiny decoration onto a Christmas tree cookie--before the icing dries--or do Williams-Sonoma cookie makers all have really tiny hands? When I first got the kit, I of course tried to recreate the booklet cookies. I immediately broke out the tweezers but quickly learned that a person lacking dexterity trying to use tweezers to decorate cookies always ends in heartbreak.

I've come to find that a slightly lazier (hurray for shortcuts!) method works almost just as well and the cookies look less OCD and more charmingly imperfect and thus appear genuinely homemade. These cookies--a recipe found on Epicurious several years ago and used every year since--are tasty, too. Buttery but not too buttery, not shudderingly sweet, with a hint of winter spices.