Why, hello! Leite's Culinaria is the James Beard Award-winning site that helps home cooks and bakers put dinner on the table and laughs in the kitchen. Hungry for more? Join 40,000 food lovers and subscribe.
Share
Fa-La-La Fabulous! 12 Cookies for the 12 Days of Christmas
Published almost 2 years ago • 2 min read
Hi Reader,
Take a hike, lords-a-leaping—we've got stand mixers-a-mixing. Instead of twelve drummers drumming, may I introduce you to a dozen friends who are far more attractive and certainly more tasty!
12 Days of Christmas Cookies
And, unlike those golden rings everyone's singing about, these won't require a second mortgage on your house.
These festive cookies are adorned with sweet-tart dried cranberries and crunchy pistachios. They're the perfect addition to your holiday cookie collection.
Italian Rainbow cookies are popular at Christmas, when they are called Neapolitan or Venetian cookies, perhaps to denote the colors of the flag of Italy.
These peanut butter blossom cookies are, like chewy and chocolatey like the classic but they also go a little glam with the addition of Guittard milk chocolate wafers. Otherwise, they're exactly the same as the kiss cookies your mom had waiting for you after school.
This Christmas cookie recipe has evolved over the years. These days, I prefer to roll out a softer, 1/4-inch (6.5 mm) thick cookie compared to when I was younger and desired a thinner, crispier cookie.
These old-fashioned peanut butter cookies, made with sugar, flour, peanut butter, and eggs, are like the cookies you grew up with, crispy, chewy, and peanut buttery.
These classic shortbread cookies are made with just 5 ingredients: butter, sugar, flour, vanilla, and a pinch of sea salt. A simple, perfect approach to a beloved Scottish tradition that's a perfect Christmas cookie.
Viennese crescent cookies are a tradition in Austria. They're made with hazelnuts, shaped like a half-moon, and dusted with confectioners' sugar. One nibble and we think you'll understand why they're a classic.
These biscochitos are a New Mexican Christmas cookie classic. Their trademark flaky texture and flavor comes from using lard in the dough, along with cinnamon, sugar, anise, and brandy.
These chocolate ginger crinkle cookies are a pleasing riff on a familiar (and easy!) Christmas standby. Chunks of crystallized ginger and dark chocolate make for a rather grown-up experience of a childhood classic.
Lebkuchen are traditional German Christmas cookies that are subtly reminiscent of gingerbread. Although actually, we prefer to refer to them as "moments of perfectly spiced cut-out cookie deliciousness."
It’s simple: chocolate cookie dough surrounds a peanut butter center, and the whole is dredged in sugar before baking. In the oven, the cookie spreads out, and like magic, you end up with a peanut butter center between two wonderful chocolate layers.
Why, hello! Leite's Culinaria is the James Beard Award-winning site that helps home cooks and bakers put dinner on the table and laughs in the kitchen. Hungry for more? Join 40,000 food lovers and subscribe.
Hi Reader, There are dinners that encourage impeccable table manners.Shellfish is not one of them.Put a steaming bowl of mussels or clams in front of me and within minutes I’m using an empty shell as tweezers, broth is running down my wrist, and The One is quietly sliding another napkin in my direction. I know what I look like. I simply don’t care.The broth is what you came for, isn’t it?The mussels or clams open and spill all that briny liquor to whatever you’ve got burbling beneath them:...
Hi Reader, This is the time of year when The One and I begin negotiating dinner based almost entirely on darkness.At six o’clock in July, I can look at a salad and think, Yes, absolutely. How refreshing. At six o’clock in October, when the windows have turned into black mirrors, and I can see my own slightly disgruntled face staring back at me, lettuce feels like a personal insult.I want pasta.Not some delicate little tangle requiring tweezers and a degree from culinary school. Something you...
Hi Reader, I’ve always believed a roast in the oven makes a house seem more civilized than it is.The One and I can have newspapers scattered everywhere, a laundry basket glaring at us from the stairs, and absolutely no idea where I put my glasses. But slide a chicken, pork shoulder, leg of lamb, or gorgeous hunk of beef into the oven, and for an hour, we’re people who have our lives together.That smell has a lot to do with it.You know the one. Fat sputtering in the pan. Garlic and herbs are...
