Holiday Baking

We po' this year, so gifts are homemade. I started out with salty maple-roasted pecans (no photos, sorry), which are just pecan halves coated in maple syrup and sprinkled with Kosher salt, then roasted for about 5 minutes at 450°F. Then I moved on to cookies. I started with brown butter sugar cookies for the flavor, but combined the recipe with your average sugar cookie for the look.

First, I attempted to brown 3 sticks of butter. There was a bit of an... accident... so I ended up with 1 cup of brown butter and added a stick of regular butter. Since I was ready to make the cookies, I just threw the cold stick of butter into the still-warm brown butter, which ended up working really well for the mixing.

After the butters equalized a bit, I creamed them with 1 cup each of white and brown sugars.

Next I added 4 eggs, one at a time, and 1 teaspoon of double-strength vanilla extract.

I stirred together 5 cups of all-purpose flour, 2 teaspoons of baking powder, and just under a teaspoon of salt (because as you know, I always use salted butter).

On low, mix the dry into the wet ingredients about 1 cup at a time. I ended up mixing in the last cup by hand because the dough was so thick my mixer was straining.

Wrap the dough and chill it for at least an hour. I do not recommend being lazy and leaving it in the bowl like I did. It stuck horribly and was a huge PITA to get out.

I let my dough chill for about 3 hours, then rolled it out on a very lightly floured surface and cut it into random shapes of cutters I have lying about (I'm not much of a dough cutter). Some of the cookies got dusted with evaporated cane juice, which gave them a nice mellow sparkle. The cookies baked on parchment at 400°F for about 7 minutes. After they cooled completely, I iced them with a mixture of icing sugar (1/2 cup) and milk(1 tablespoon). To one batch, I added about 1/2 tablespoon of blackberry-flavored corn syrup, and to another, I added a splash of almond extract and maraschino cherry juice (mostly for the color). Then, I went out and bought some cookie icing so I could make silly designs.