I’m not what you’d call an enthusiastic cook.
To me, kitchen duty is more chore than pleasure. Sure, I love good food, but not enough to spend hours preparing it.
I’ll take a paintbrush over a pastry brush any day. I guess that’s why I’m the home writer, not the food writer.
But all that culinary aversion disappears every December. Suddenly I transform into a cutout-cookie superchef.
Every Christmas season, the better part of a day is devoted to the ritual of making sour cream cookies. They’ve been part of my family’s celebration as long as I can remember, and probably before. They’re delicious — just sweet enough, with a hint of nutmeg. But it’s not just the cookie that’s important. It’s the way they’re decorated.
Cookie decorating, in my family, is an art form. When I was a kid it involved just smearing icing on with a knife and loading on the sprinkles. But as my sister and I got older, we weren’t satisfied with the crude results. We started honing our decorating skills and looking at freshly baked cookies as miniature canvases.
Suddenly those little pointy-topped bottles of food coloring from the grocery store had to go, replaced with more vibrant (and expensive) gel coloring. We added cake-decorating techniques to our repertoire and started supplementing our homemade icing with tubes of decorator frosting.
Always the cookies include giant Santa faces, snowmen and stockings made with the red plastic Aunt Chick’s cookie cutters that have been in my family for probably 60 years. (Apparently we’re not the only family who loves them. You can now buy reproductions at www.grammascutters.com.)
To those we’ve added reindeer, sleighs, churches, angels, stars, bells, trees — even a little house that my sister will painstakingly decorate with strings of lights made from tiny dots of icing. Really.
That may be the most obsessive of the adornments, but it’s hardly the only one. Snowmen get scarves and mittens. Stars get sprigs of holly; stockings get teeny bows on the presents they hold. And reindeer always — always — get red cinnamon-candy noses. I’m not sure how Prancer and Blitzen feel about the snub.
My sister now lives a thousand miles away and rarely gets home for the cookie-making frenzy, but I’ve managed to recruit my husband to help — and sometimes my adult son, if he’s home for a visit. They’ve gotten pretty good at it, although there’s often a little edge to their creations. The broken reindeer cookie my son accented with icing “blood” was memorable. So was the red star he adorned with a hammer and sickle.
Don’t bother firing off hate mail. He was being ironic.
I’m not sure what it is about the cookies that unleashes my inner Rembrandt, but I do know they’re the one thing my family expects each Christmas. I could probably leave the ham off the menu and no one would complain, but sour cream cookies? Perish the thought.
Even my brother asked last year if I’d be making them, and I rarely see the man eat sweets.
At the risk of tramping on the toes of my food-writing colleague Lisa Abraham, here’s the recipe. Sorry, decorating lessons are not included.
SOUR CREAM COOKIES
1 cup butter, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
2 egg yolks
½ cup sour cream
1 tsp. vanilla extract
4 cups flour
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. nutmeg
½ teaspoon baking soda
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream butter and sugar. Add egg yolks, sour cream and vanilla extract. Combine dry ingredients in a separate bowl and stir in.
Roll out dough ⅛ to ¼ inch thick on a floured surface and cut in desired shapes with floured cookie cutters. Back on an ungreased cookie sheet 10 to 12 minutes, or until cookies are just beginning to turn golden on the bottom.
Frost with icing made of powdered sugar, 1 to 2 tablespoons softened butter, ⅛ to ¼ tsp. vanilla extract and enough milk to create a spreadable consistency.
And be sure to get creative.
But not so artistic that you can’t bring yourself to eat them.
Mary Beth Breckenridge can be reached at 330-996-3756 or mbrecken@thebeaconjournal.com. You can also become a fan on Facebook at http://tinyurl.com/mbbreck, follow her on Twitter @MBBreckenridge and read her blog at www.ohio.com/blogs/mary-beth.