3 holiday COOKIES
To soothe that comfort food craving
See that industrious holiday baker, the one with the reindeer-shaped cookie cutters and all the right pastry bling? Well, pan left – way left, toward the kitchen with no fancy mixer. That’s where you might find me, a cookie lover with little patience and even less pastry talent.
Each year, I crave warm, home-baked Christmas cookies, the kind I’d be proud to enter in a holiday cookie swap. But those gingerbread men in their sharp, royalicing coats can be complicated little buggers with all their demands to be decorated. Who needs such stress amid a Christmas sugar crave?
Here’s a trio of cookies that makes no such demands. I found them in food blogger Naomi Robinson’s new cookbook “Baker’s Royale” (Running Press, $28). A selftaught baker with a sturdy Instagram following, Robinson does not burden her recipes with unnecessary steps or too many gadget requirements.
About her cookie recipes, Robinson writes: “I love how easy they are to put together, and they never fail to scratch the comfort food itch.”
It was experimenting on classic cookie recipes – with butter, eggs, flour and sugar – that she “initially learned how to riff,” she says.
The cookies featured in the following recipes will satisfy the seasonal sugar whims. And they’re jazzy enough to be presented as special holiday confections.
The following recipes and author notes are reprinted from Naomi Robinson’s cookbook “Baker’s Royale: 75 Twists on All Your Favorite Sweets” with permission of its publisher, Running Press.