C is for Cookie

Two days ago, I made the dough for some of my favorite holiday cookies: a treat my mom would make year after year called "Sour Cream Christmas Cookies," a sugar cookie-esque recipe that gets some subtle tartness from sour cream and a little spice from nutmeg. I prepared the dough and put it in the fridge to give it at least one night to chill out. I was also using the "cool off" time to procrastinate the part of rolling the cookies out, because I really don't like rolling out cookie dough! I cover myself in flour from head to toe, use parchment paper on top of my rolling surface, use cold dough instead of warm...and no matter what, I end up with sticky dough sticking to the rolling pin, sticking to me, sticking to my rolling surface and refusing to lift up, making all of my cookie cutouts look like misshapen balloons that have lost some air. Last year I made two cookie recipes that call for rolling out the dough for cookie cutters (these sour cream cookies and gingerbread cookies) and in both cases I plopped the dough onto a large piece of plastic wrap, shaped it into a log, set it in the freezer for a while to harden, then took them out of the freezer and easily sliced off my little round cookies for the cookie sheets. On some of them I even took a very small star-shaped cookie cutter and cut out the center of the circle, so that I had both these star-wreath shapes and tiny star cookies. Fun!

But for some reason this year I thought, "It can't be that bad, right? People do this all over the nation, the world, every day around the holidays. The dough can't be that sticky--I must just be remembering a particularly bad year or something." Nope. Rolling the dough out sucks. I was able to get the dough successfully rolled out one time and cut out some gingerbread men, Christmas trees, and trains for Alton. Then my triumph ended, and my efforts yielded that sticky blobby mess that I told you about, and I finally wound up ripping off small hunks of the dough, rolling them into balls, patting them flat on the cookie sheet, and letting Alton imprint them with star shapes. And you know what? They still taste GOOD!






Maybe next time I'll just use my trusty old-school cookie press.

P.S. While I was uploading this post, Alton went over to his stack of Christmas books, picked out the nativity board book, and thumbed through the pages reading aloud to himself, which consists of flipping to the pictures that contain the Christ-child and saying, "Hi, Baby Jesus!" Could he get any cuter? No!
P.P.S. And as Andy reminded me, Alton was very bummed out that after helping with the cookies he would not receive one before dinner. But he loved the sour cream cookie he received as a little dessert, and he also loved the "woochie," one of the Sicilian fig cuccidati that my cousin Matt made (pictured below) and generously donated to our kitchen--we're doing a trade and I'm providing him with biscotti.