Christmas cookies – a family recipe

One of our family Christmas traditions is giving homemade cookies to teachers, neighbors, friends and family members during the holiday season (and eating a lot of them ourselves too, of course).
For as long as I can remember the kids were involved in this, being given the enormous responsibility to pick out the cookie cutters and decorate the dough with sprinkles, smarties and what not. A whole lot of fun!
Although I love my children being the almost-adults they are, decorating Christmas cookies together with them is one of the things that got lost over the years.
However ….. they still like to eat them, and I still like to make them (decorating included) – so all is good.
The recipe for our cookies is really simple, but over the years people have constantly commented that they’re “wow” soooo good. Since I can’t gift the actual cookies to you, my lovely readers, I thought I’d go for the second best option here: sharing the recipe with you all!
I’ve tried to track down where I got the recipe originally from, but just couldn’t find it. No surprise, really – it’s an old clipping, at least more than 25 years old ….
It says “festive baking” at the bottom, now this is very true!

I’ve made an English and Dutch version, saved them as pdf’s – all you have to do is click here for the English pdf, and here for the Dutch pdf.

maRRose Christmas Cookies

Ingredients:
1 cup sugar
1 cup (two sticks) butter, softened
1,5 teaspoons vanilla
2 eggs
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda

Tools:
Mixer
Baking sheets
Rolling pin
Wire rack

Recipe:
Mix sugar, butter, vanilla and eggs in large bowl (I use my KitchenAid stand mixer for this).
Stir in remaining ingredients – mix well.
Divide into 3 equal parts, wrap in saran/plastic wrap and refrigerate at least 4 hours.
Preheat oven to 400 Fahrenheit. Roll out dough on floured surface to thickness of approx. 1/8-inch.
Using cookie cutters, cut out your desired shapes and place them roughly 1 inch apart on ungreased baking sheet. Repeat the rolling and cutting process with the remaining dough (leftover scraps can be re-rolled).
Decorate (or not), bake for about 7/8 minutes or until just golden brown around edges. Remove from cookie sheet. Cool on wire rack.

Last year I made these jar lid covers for the containers that I used to gift our Christmas cookies in – they turned out great and looked so festive!
I used this tutorial to make the crocheted covers; the little holly leaves are the ones I’ve made before after Attic24’s diy, I just added the red berries ….
Enjoy!
Love,
Marianne xx