Category Archives: Christmas

The Julian Christmas cookies are my favorite.

Christmas, food and cooking, , , , ,

Many of us have completed the Twelve Days of Christmas, but I haven’t finished telling about all my activities connected to the Nativity Feast. My fellow Orthodox Christians who are on the traditional Julian calendar have just begun to count the days, however, so if we keep them in mind it won’t seem strange to muse a while longer on Christmas cookies. Plus, they are only Christmas cookies because I bake them at Christmas; you could enjoy them at any season of the year.

These are my favorite because of their chewy texture, the flavors of citrus and almond, and because my friends and family who are gluten-intolerant can fully enjoy them.

Last year I made two batches of this invention, but I wasn’t completely settled on the amounts of a couple of the ingredients. This time I made only one batch (so far), but after my latest tweaks I’m confident that if you try them, you are likely to be happy with the result. There are no grain flours in the recipe, so they are gluten-free.

Dried (sweetened) mandarin oranges

MANDARIN ALMOND COOKIES

7 oz. almond paste, in pieces
4 oz. cold butter, salted or not
1/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup powdered sugar
scant 1/4 teaspoon salt

Combine the above ingredients in a food processor until evenly mixed. Add and process:

4 large egg whites, one at a time.

Remove from processor to a bowl and add:

2 3/4 cups finely ground almond flour
6 oz. package of dried mandarin oranges (found at Trader Joe’s), finely chopped

Put the dough in the refrigerator for an hour.

Put 1/2 cup granulated sugar in one bowl, and
1/2 cup powdered sugar in another bowl.

Drop heaping tablespoonsful of dough into the sugar; gently coat and shape into 1 1/2″ balls. Repeat in powdered sugar.

Set 1 inch apart on parchment-lined baking sheets. Bake until golden or golden brown, at 325 degrees, 22-25 minutes. Remove to racks to cool. Cookies will be crumbly until thoroughly cool. They keep well in the refrigerator or freezer.

The amount of sugar here is a reduction from my original experiment, and I might try cutting back a little more next time, hoping that the chewiness of the cookie won’t be affected too much. The recipe that inspired me was an Italian Orange Fig Cookie that my son had made in 2022. I tried that last year with disappointing results, and created this one instead because I had the mandarin oranges on hand. I hope Trader Joe’s continues to carry that item!

This cookie might be worth the trouble.

Christmas, food and cooking, ,

I did get around to baking cookies — after Christmas Day. With so many family members arriving and departing at different times, our schedule of activities was hard for me to keep up with, and cookies weren’t a high priority. I made only two kinds in the end, the ones for which I had made a point of buying ingredients. One of those was the one I gave to you last month from the New York Times cooking site: Ginger Cheesecake Cookies.

They were not difficult to make, but they were tedious. You freeze the cheesecake filling in little dollops and then wrap soft gingerbread dough around one at a time. That wasn’t hard to do at first, but I had to interrupt my work and put the dough in the fridge for a day, and when I took it out again it never would become pliable enough to manipulate easily.

Piping the dollops, from the video.

However, my dollops of cheesecake came out almost perfectly even with the amount of dough, and in spite of the sloppy way I did everything (for example, I used a spoon rather than a piping bag to form the cheesecake parts), the resulting cookies were big and beautiful — and dreamy-delicious. The balls flatten in the oven and you end up with a hidden layer of cheesecake inside a cookie that has an intoxicating flavor in itself, from fresh, dried and candied ginger going into the mix. The contrast with the creamy cheesecake layer is special; the family members who were still here to try the new cookie raved about them.

When I finally put the last pan in the oven, I thought, “I’ll never make these again!” But I have already changed my mind about that. The recipe is for 18 cookies, which seemed a ridiculously small number to me, so I doubled it. When I saw how huge the cookies came out, and had realized by then that the dough would best be used right away, I decided that a single batch is plenty to work with in one session.

From the NYT Cooking video.

If you are interested in this cookie, and you click on the link for the recipe, you might want to read the cooks’ comments; many of them suggested making this into a bar cookie, to make it faster. This recipe was one of the Cookie Week 2024 collection, so there is an accompanying video of the creator demonstrating everything. I hope some of you try the recipe in one way or another and let me know how it works for you: Ginger Cheesecake Cookies.

Tea and stollen for the whirled.

books, Christmas, Nativity, tea, ,

Early this morning I waved good-bye to the last Christmas guests as they drove off toward home in Colorado. A few minutes later I was back in bed, and soon after that had fallen asleep while listening to Jonathan Pageau’s podcast on “Christmas: The Anchor of Reality.”

Now it’s afternoon, I just finished breakfast, and decided to try one of the new teas I received recently from Tea Runners. The grandchildren who just departed liked this one, called Winter Wonderland Rooibos. I added half and half, and served up a slice of the stollen Soldier gave me for Christmas.

 

I was arranging my stack of Christmas books and realized that I have not read Winter Fire during either of the Christmas seasons since I got it; it is subtitled Christmas with G.K. Chesterton, and is compiled by Ryan Whitaker Smith. So I opened its pages and browsed a little, and remembered that it is arranged as somewhat of a 30-Day Advent collection. Yet for myself I think it will be a good read in the next few days, as winter has only begun here, and I could use more meditation on the Incarnation, as I process all the events large and small that have whirled around me of late.

There are so many things I want to write about, to highlight here, of our splendid Glad celebrations over the last ten days, but at this point my head is still spinning a bit too crazily, and my heart just wants to go to church, light a candle on St. Basil’s Day and The Circumcision of Christ, and give thanks for all that God has done.

Gift from a friend at church.