#7 Movarian White Christmas Cookies 1946, Part 1

First night:
"Makes about 6 dozen cookies." I read through the rest of the recipe, and considered the meticulously cut star shapes with two-toned frosting in the photo. I could do without a 6-dozen-cookie-with-icing task, so I mixed up half the recipe, wrapped it in plastic and went to bed.

Second night:
I tried to ready myself for frosting cookies, which would be the third step in this process. I'm not really a glutton for punishment, and I haven't frosted a cookie since my kids were little. I can extrude cookie dough through a disposable plastic bag, but icing a cookie requires special equipment.

First, you draw the outline of the cookie around the edges with perfectly flowing icing through a tiny metal tip on the end of a pastry bag. You let this dry while keeping the rest of the icing moist. Guess what? It all wants to dry out, so you have to cover it with wet paper towels. I remember making only a limited amount and putting it in my pastry bag all at once to keep it moist.

OK, so where is that pastry bag I had once? A search through my pantry turned up:

Dough with copious flour under it.

• all my cookie cutters
• a plastic candy mold and Dark Cocoa Candy melts, petrified and fused together
• jars of intense professional food coloring I'd used to make play dough -  I'm glad they were double bagged, because always ooze into their plastic bags.
• a prepackaged tube of White Decorating Icing - I could hear the dried icing rattle inside as I tossed it in the garbage.

Dough with copious flour over it.

I never found my pastry bag - or the metal tips I'd bought. I would have to visit my neighborhood cake decorating store soon. I satisfied myself with rolling out the cookies and baking them.

The dry sherry in this recipe gave the dough a lovely floral aroma. I had high hopes. (No, not as a result of sipping the sherry.)

Unfortunately, the dough was still very sticky after overnight refrigeration. Gotta try something else.

"Where's that marble slab you had for bread baking?" I asked my husband.


"I think you threw it out."

"That's what you say about anything you can't find."

I found it nicely pre-chilled in the garage, washed it off and threw down a pile of flour. I covered the dough with more flour and rolled out a second batch. The cold marble gave me an extra 10 minutes to work with cold dough. Some owls were skinny and some shaped like a jar; some lost an ear. I did make up some stars, as illustrated in the book, but their curved points gave them a distinct starfish quality.

TIP: I found that the stars released better from the cutters if I used a toothpick to poke the points down onto the cookie sheet, but the cutting was still painful.

The cookies emerged from the oven with wrinkled surfaces. How were these supposed to frost evenly? I  bit in. The lush aroma of the dough was gone, the flavor was mildly sweet but average. The texture was crisp, though, and showed the proportions of ingredients were likely just right for a good crisp texture, even if not for easy rolling out.

Tired and frustrated, I resolved to find some decorating tools at the local cake decorating shop.

To be continued...

This recipe is here and here.