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« Holiday Magazine Review | Main | Baking By The Seat of Your Pants »
Every Christmas cooks get out lots of cookie recipes - old family favorites, new confections from food magazines, gingerbread men, Mexican wedding cookies, sour cream cookies filled with jam, chocolate cookies filled with peppermint cream, and hundreds more. But the one kind of cookie that almost all cooks make at Christmas is the sugar cookie, those flat, un-spectacular cookies that we cut into shapes and decorate with colored icing. Hundreds of sites and cookbooks offer recipes for these little bits of holiday tradition, so the question is, which one is the best? Which recipe will give you cookies that will look good and also taste like something you wouldn't be embarrassed to serve guests.
This year Gourmet published a recipe for sugar cookies, so I decided to test it against the recipe from The Martha Stewart Living Cookbook that my mom uses every year. The cookies from the Gourmet recipe (the hands and feet in the picture) required less time to bake and turned out a nice light gold, and they had a nice sweet taste, but they were so hard to bite into that for a second I was thought I might hurt my mouth. Maybe a good cookie to hang on a tree as an ornament, but not one to serve to guests as dessert. The Martha Stewart recipe (the geese and duckie cookies) had a little less sugar, more butter, and more flour, with the additions of baking soda and a little liquer for flavor. They take a little longer to cook (they're 1/4 inch thick instead of 1/8 inch), and star to burn to a dark brown around the edges before the middles are done, but they have a light, flaky texture and a great taste.
Somewhere there must be a recipe out there that tastes good and looks great - until then, I think I'm going with taste this year.
Posted by georgia to Kitchen and Cooking , Reviews on December 11, 2005 11:13 PM | permalink | Email this post
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Thanks for posting this. I was trying to decide between the Martha Stewart recipe and one I found on Epicurious. I'm going with MS : ) No time to taste test.
Posted by: Kimbie at December 12, 2005 01:09 AM
I think it was real simple magazine last year where I got my sugar cookies recipe. Its so good. 2 tablespoons of sour cream just makes it gorgeous!!
Posted by: Jenny at December 12, 2005 07:38 PM
That sounds wonderful, Jenny! Do you still have the recipe? I would love to try it.
Posted by: Georgia at December 12, 2005 08:29 PM
