Look what WE got! They arrived last Wednesday, December 20, in perfect time for Christmas! They are from Aunt Ann in Michigan!
For the past several years, Sue and I have been the family cookie purveyors, baking and shipping our family heritage Christmas cookies to friends and family. This year, with their various health concerns, and with the year kind of rough overall, my Mom and Dad bankrolled the annual cookie production, so that our cookie-gifts were from all four of us.
But this year, Aunt Ann, who is 96, found a way to make cookies and send them to family, including us! Whoaaa!!!
Can you imagine how this felt, after Sue and I’ve spent years trying to figure out how to make several types of cookies? Baking, tasting, critiquing, comparing the cookies in hand (in mouth) with the cookies in my memory? “The recipe says ‘butter,’ but do you think we should’ve used margarine—?”
I’m honestly not much of a baker. I didn’t learn at my mom’s or grandmas’ side. I’ve asked Mom and others for tips, but when it comes to it, I’ve had to figure it out on my own, trial and error.
And one of the reasons I make all these old-fashioned, family cookies—from my family and from Sue’s—is that I’m one of the few left making them. And I know how much my parents and the others in their generation enjoy having them at Christmas. . . . And Sue and I enjoy them, too, and we know others in our generation like them the way we do.
So we got this box in the mail, and it had cookie tins, and they were filled with these beautiful, gorgeous, precious, delicious creations from my Aunt Ann. Eight kinds! A note with them said that she had help from my cousin Sue Ann and from Aunt Ann’s helper/caregiver, Jennifer. I suppose Sue Ann and Jennifer were the “hands,” while Aunt Ann mostly did “supervision,” but hey, it counts.
Bully for her! Bully for all of them! I feel blessed beyond all reason to have the opportunity to enjoy these cookies, made by my aunt.
So, before we got too far into eating up these cookies, I did a little photo shoot, to the best of my ability. I’m providing the names, and links to possible similar recipes, if I can figure out what kind they are. Aunt Ann and my cousins might have different names for them. Every family has their own traditions, their own suite of “must haves.” So although a few of these are well-known, some of these cookies are rather unfamiliar to me.
But here’s the fun part: even the ones that are “unfamiliar” are still somehow familiar. They are the kind of Christmas cookies that my mom or Sue’s mom might have made. They are midcentury recipes, the kind I grew up with at Christmas bazaars at church, classroom mothers, Blue Bird gatherings, visits to friends’ houses. The kinds of cookies that won bake-off contests in the fifties and sixties. Also, when I was young, we spent some Christmases in Michigan with Aunt Ann and her family, so there’s a good chance I’ve had these very recipes before, made, for the most part, by the same hands.
White Chocolate–Dipped Ginger Cookies; Dipped Gingersnaps
I found a couple of promising online versions of these cookies, here and here. The white chocolate smoothed the edges of the spices. And these cookies weren’t as “snappy” (hard!) as the ones you get at the grocery store. Eighty-two thumbs up!
Lepkuchen!
Everyone’s got their own version of this German and German-immigrant favorite. There are a lot of variations because there are a lot of different ingredients to vary.
- Germans tend to use honey, while German immigrants used sorghum or molasses—and then the molasses type can vary, too.
- The leavening varies; eggs usually are included; my usual recipe, from my Dad’s grandma, uses strong, cold black coffee plus baking soda, but I’ve seen other recipes that use buttermilk and baking soda, which yields a richer flavor.
- The amount and types of dried fruits and nuts varies. I’ll bet that today’s mass-produced candied fruits are horrible compared to whatever was used 150 years ago. (Like, do you think people candied their own citron, lemon, or orange peel in great-grandma’s day? That would be a game-changer!)
- Also, in both sides of my family, black walnuts are necessary, while Germans in Germany would surely find our strongly flavored New World nut an abomination.
- And the array of spices varies.
I’ve seen two different recipes that Aunt Ann has used. I wonder which one she used this year. Obviously, she makes hers like bars, in a sheet pan, then cuts them after cooking. I roll out the dough, cut it into rectangles (I use a roller pizza cutter), then bake the rectangular cookies on cookie sheets. Aunt Ann’s were much more tender than the ones I make. But as with most everything else in this world, Variety is the spice of life!
Cherry Christmas Slices; Christmas Jeweled Icebox Cookies
I really, really want her recipe for these. They’re so pretty, they’re delicious, and because they’re icebox cookies, I know they’re fairly easy to make. Also, you can prep them ahead. And the idea of rolling the dough in colored sanding sugar before slicing is genius. I love those candied cherries, and the butter (yeah, real butter!) shortbread base is perfection.
These strike me as a midcentury recipe, one from the 1950s, 60s, or 70s, thus a mom/aunts/friends’ mom cookie, and not one from my grandmas’ and great aunts’ generation. And at this point (creak!) cookies from my own childhood are considered “old fashioned”!
I've found three possible online recipes for these, here, here, and here.
Snickerdoodles
The old favorite. Everybody loves these. I don’t usually make them because they’re pretty easy to make, and they’re often available year round. I put them in the category with chocolate chips and oatmeal-raisin cookies. They’re good on a cookie tray because picky eaters who are skeptical about raisins, dried fruits, nuts, and spices can nosh on them with comfort. And boy, are they a comfort cookie.
I Don’t Know These Cookies
But they were good! They were cake-like, and some kind of drop/ball cookie. With a tasty glaze.
Chocolate or Cocoa Crinkle Cookies
These were nice and chocolaty. There are lots of recipes for these, including this one here. I’ve even made crinkle cookies using Filipino ube, so they were a lovely purple. I’ve also seen recipes for pretty green matcha crinkle cookies! Still, I want Aunt Ann's recipe, because hers were really, really good.
Billy Goats
A Renner family favorite. Akin to “hermits” and “rocks,” these are perhaps the most undersung cookies of Christmas. Lebkuchen have an intriguing pedigree back to the Old World, but billy goats hearken to 1930s kitchens, where mothers tried to push as much nutrition as possible into their family’s foods. High school girls took Domestic Science classes that were abuzz with chemistry, physics, the relatively new discovery of vitamins, the importance of minerals and calories. During the Great Depression, providing your family with calories was considered important, because it gave them energy for all the physical activity Americans did: walking to school, walking to church, walking to stores, walking everywhere, because plenty of people didn’t own cars. Women and men labored physically in almost every job. Even clerical work required moving around a lot; even flinging something in the trash required physical movement, because trash cans were real, not virtual.
But I digress. The best thing about billy goats, hermits, and rocks cookies is not just that they were kind of a precursor to the granola bar, or fruit leather, or trail mix, it’s that they are greater than the sum of their parts. The combination of dates, black walnuts, brown sugar, and cinnamon yields a flavor that can only be called “billy goat.” If you can’t fathom how this can be, try it yourself. Seriously, these are elevated cookies. See here for the recipe I use, that came from Grandma Renner, the mother of my mom and of Aunt Ann.
Meringue Cookies
Unfortunately, these didn’t survive the shipping with a high degree of beauty. I think in order for cookies like these to arrive in a pristine state, they’d need to be wrapped like a wine glass in something fluffy and then tucked into their own hard-sided container, so that heavier cookies wouldn’t jostle and smush them. (These aren’t criticisms; just notes for myself, for future packaging situations.) Anyway, fortunately, and much more importantly, none of the flavor was damaged! There are lots of delicious flavors and morsels that can be incorporated with meringue cookies. I think that these were close, here.
These were very delicious! Again, I think a midcentury recipe; I’d say fifties or sixties. I’d love to have the recipe for this!
There you have it. Delicious cookies, but much sweeter to enjoy them from my dear Aunt Ann. What a nice gift, and a memorable one.
Gratitude.
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