For years, I didn’t feel like making cut-out Christmas cookies. I thought it was a lot of work. Stir the dough, chill it, roll it out, hope nothing sticks, cut it out, roll out the dough again, hope nothing sticks again… Accordingly, I ignored the most important Christmas cookie recipe of my childhood and indulged in cookies to cut or shape freehand. And of course I still love: lemon meltaways, alpine bread, chocolate snow globes, walnut cookies with olive oil – all real hits!
But this year I was kind of sentimental and longed for the cookie flavor of my childhood. And as it turns out, these easy cut-out Christmas cookies are at least as quick to make as my other favorites. It’s probably not for nothing that my mother has been following this exact recipe for over 40 years: just a few ingredients result in a dough that’s absolutely easy to work with (for which you don’t even need a food processor), that doesn’t stick to the roll or work surface (even without a silicone mat) and can be rolled out several times without having to add tons of flour and it becoming brittle. The taste is: sweet, buttery and sugary, I immediately felt like I was five again and saw myself standing in our tiny kitchen – OK, my current kitchen isn’t much bigger either – and decorating the finished cookies with icing and nut halves.
As you can see, the demands on decoration are now somewhat greater. Just the amount of time it took me to find the “right” sprinkles… Of course they had to be certain colors and certain sizes. And do you want to know how long it took me to decorate the almost 80 cookies? Two hours, maybe more. Of course I also had back pain afterwards.
Surprise shapes
By the way, I found it particularly nice to find a duck and a goose in my cookie cutter collection. The duck was probably originally part of my set (which I bought at Aldi around 2008). But the goose must have come along later. It still had a price tag on it, meaning I hadn’t used it yet. Where is the goose from? No idea! That’s why I made extra goose cookies, covered the body with icing and dipped the beak and feet in melted couverture.
What I used:
Red-green-white sprinkle beads*
little gingerbread men made of sugar*
pastel colored nonpareils*
pastel-colored sugar pearls*
Chocolate sprinkles*
The links lead to Amazon, but of course you can also get most of it in well-stocked supermarkets from November.
Christmas cookies to cut out
My mother’s old recipe
PRESS
Ingredients
- 500 G wheat flour Type 405
- 2 Eggs room temperature
- 240 G cold butter (vegan butter works, I use “Rama Sooo buttery!”)
- 250 G Sugar
- 2 pinches Salt
preparation
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Sift flour into a sufficiently large bowl. Form a well in the middle and crack the room temperature eggs into it.
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Place butter on top in pieces, spread sugar around the edges, add pinches of salt.
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Now work everything into a smooth dough with your hands. This is really quick.
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Wrap the dough in cling film and store in the fridge for 1 hour.
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Preheat the oven to 175° C (top/bottom heat).
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Then roll out on a lightly floured work surface, cut out cookies and bake on a baking tray lined with baking paper for 10-15 minutes each. (For me it’s 12 minutes, you’ll have to find out for yourself.)
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Let the cookies cool and then decorate as desired.
Notes
I always work the finished dough in thirds and leave the parts that I don’t need in the fridge. If it becomes too soft, it will of course no longer be possible to roll it out without any problems and will instead stick to the roll.