Every year on December 18^th, anyone with a sweet tooth celebrates a beautiful holiday known as National Bake Cookies Day. Every year, I love to get out the old family recipes and make sugar cookies and spritz cookies to enjoy throughout the holiday season. They’re fun to make and great for sharing with friends and family. I thought I would share two of my favorite family recipes. Enjoy baking cookies this year!

Old-Fashioned Michigan Sugar Cookies

I remember when my mom found this recipe when I was young. I think it might have been on the back of a package of cream cheese, and we loved it in my house. I have used this cookie recipe all year; I just changed the cutter’s shape. For a while in college, I was obsessed with a chicken cookie cutter I found and made chicken cookies for all occasions. I admit I am not very good at icing, so I just make a quick icing out of powered sugar, milk, butter and food coloring, slather it, and add sprinkles. But you can make these fancier with royal icing. These cookies should be soft and not crispy, which I like in a cookie.

Ingredients:

• 8 ounces of cream cheese (room temperature)
• 2 cups of butter (room temperature)
• ¾ cup of sugar
• ½ teaspoon of vanilla extract
• 2 ½ cups of flour – sifted

Instructions:

Start by preheating your oven to 350 degrees.

Combine cream cheese, butter, sugar, and extract and mix until well blended. Add flour and mix well. Chill for several hours or overnight.

Roll the dough an eighth inch thick on a lightly floured surface and cut with cookie cutters. Please put on an ungreased cookie sheet and bake for 6 to 8 minutes.

Frost or decorate

The handwritten note on this card says it makes 5 dozen! I don’t know how accurate that is, but maybe I also don’t roll my cookies thin enough.

Holly Wreaths

This recipe is much older than I am. It came in the book with my mom’s MIRRO cookie press, which I am sure she got as a newlywed in the early 1960s. There are several recipes in the booklet, and we have used many of them, but the Holly Wreaths have always been my favorite. The secret ingredient is cream cheese! You may have guessed by now that I love cream cheese in cookies. These are small treats with just a touch of icing and a cinnamon red hot candy for decoration. My mom was good at making them look neat. I am not that good. Sometimes, I even cheat, use the recipe for the wreath cookies, and make regular spritz cookies with my modern plastic cookie press.

Ingredients:

• ½ cup butter (room temperature)
• ½ package of cream cheese (room temperature)*
• ¼ cup sugar
• ½ teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 cup sifted all-purpose flour

*A note about the cream cheese. The original ingredients state that ½ package of cream cheese is 1 ½ ounces. Here’s the thing. Cream cheese comes in 8-ounce packages these days (did they come in 3 ounces in the 60s?), and I honestly don’t know what I do. It would make a difference, but now I second-guess how I interpret this recipe. So, measure with your heart.

Instructions:

Start by preheating your oven to 375 degrees.

Cream the butter and cheese, add the sugar, and cream well. Add vanilla extract.

Slowly add the sifted flour and mix well.

Fill a cookie press half full. Press the cookies on an ungreased cookie sheet using the star plate. Hold the press in a semi-horizontal position and form wreathes by moving the press in a circular motion. Gently push the ends of the dough together to form wreaths. They are not too big, maybe an inch and a half across. Bake for 8-10 minutes.

The recipe says it makes 2 dozen.

A Note About 3-D Cookies

I grew up in a very midwestern white family. I’m one-quarter Polish and three-quarters Canadian. These are not cultures known for overly flamboyant food. Our cookies were pretty tame. But my partner is Greek and Italian, and when I started spending holidays with his family in the 90s, I learned all about traditional Italian Christmas cookies. Many of them are what I call 3-D cookies rather than the flat sugar cookies of my childhood. His mom would make tiny tarts and cakey almond cookies. I appreciated them, though I’ve never been ambitious enough to make them.

I don’t have recipes for them, but you can see a tarlet recipe here, a pizzelle recipe here, and the Italian Christmas cookies here.

We want to hear from you. What are your favorite holiday cookies?

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