Season’s treatings

Baking cookies for gifting or serving a timeless holiday-time tradition

Cookies are the timeless currency of Christmas, and making them can be a great activity to enjoy with children, grandchildren or a group of friends.

Cookie exchanges, popular among church groups and other types, can be a great way to expand the styles of cookies for Christmas eating or giving — especially if each person attending brings two- or three-dozen cookies to exchange with others.

The cookies can become gifts to wrap up and mail to faraway friends, brought to gatherings as hostess gifts or made to give to teachers, the mailman, your hairdresser and others who share their energy and talents throughout the year.

So head out to shop for cookie tins, baking sheets and a rack for cooling. Assemble cookie cutters and rolling pins to create an assembly line for making cookies. A cookie scoop, available at shops that have Good Grips kitchen tools by Oxo, will allow you to easily make large batches of samesize cookies without measuring or weighing the dough. Buy small ziptop or cellophane bags to keep your soft cookies separate from crispy ones so their moisture doesn’t make crisp cookies limp.

Choose recipes for sturdy cookies that will travel well, and save the delicate ones for serving at home. Shortbreads and sugar cookies are ideal, as are chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal raisin cookies, which everyone seems to love.

Dig out that Tupperware and other air-tight containers to store your cookies as you prepare them as gifts. Most cookies can be baked five days ahead, so plan your mailing schedule accordingly.

Baking cookies requires some techniques for making sure they turn out right. Here are some tips:

• Because most ovens have varying temperatures, you’ll need to rotate cookie sheets halfway through the cooking time.

• Most ovens will take four cookie sheets at a time when you place racks in upper and lower thirds of the oven.

• Lining the sheets with parchment will prevent cookies from sticking, but if you leave them to cool for too long they may stick anyway. If that happens, place the cookie sheet back in the oven for two minutes and then remove cookies to a rack to finish cooling.

• Be sure to let cookie sheets cool between batches.

• Use your timer as a guideline, but you also should eyeball for doneness. Cookies should be firm and lightly browned when done.

Although cookie doughs can be mixed by hand using a heavy wooden spoon, mixing with the paddle attachment of a heavyduty electric mixer is much easier.

Most good cookie doughs require chilling before turning into cookies, so choose your cookies, make the doughs and refrigerate all at the same time. If you’ll be baking with kids or friends make the doughs well before they arrive so you can jump in with cutting and baking cookies while they are there.

To make Linzer cookies you will need a large and a small cookie cutter of the same shape. Vary the cutters to make a pleasing variety of cookies.

METRO CREATIVE CONNECTION Cookies are a great treat to leave for Santa on Christmas Eve.