Back from the Holidays

I hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas and New Years!

Normal blog posts will resume after today, but I would like to give you a recap of the baking that my mother and I did over the holidays.

My mom and I have been baking for a while (she has about 20 years more experience than I do). Even so, we still learned a few things along the way, and I would like to share these tips with you to help you out with your next baking venture:

1) Hickory Nuts are a fabulous substitute for any nut in a cookie. They look a lot like pecans, and they freeze very well once they’re shelled. They don’t have the bitter taste of pecans, but rather have a maple syrup after taste. We substituted them for pecans in a couple of recipes.

2) Royal Icing is magical for decorating. My mom and I were flabbergasted when we found out that you could use royal icing to decorate sugar cookies. It’s was kind of common sense after a magazine gave us the idea, but we didn’t realize just how good it looked. Basically you outline the cookie with the icing, fill it in and spread the royal icing over the surface of the cookie. Then, while it is still wet, pipe little designs in a different color, and the patterns will sink into the first layer. They look almost professionally done! There’s a picture of our creations at the bottom of the post.

3) Some recipes suck. At the beginning of our baking venture, we made a list of cookies we wanted to bake and booked marked them in the various magazines and books we got them out of. A couple of the recipes flopped… even though we followed them to a tee. Sometimes they didn’t bake right or didn’t taste good. And you know what? It happens! Don’t let it get you down when a recipe doesn’t work out. Out of 200 cookie recipes in one magazine, all of them are probably not 100% tested. They just look pretty on the page.

4) Mixing and Matching is important. I made sure when we were choosing our recipes that there was diversity. Because these cookies were going to be presented together, there needed to be many different flavors and many different looks. Palmiers and Macaroons look beautiful and create visual interest within the presentation, but there were still classics and simple treats scattered between the eye candy. The Snickerdoodles were the first cookies gone and probably the easiest to make. If you’re baking for a party, try making small batches of different types of cookies instead of huge batches of the same things. The advantage of diversity is that people will want to try one of each.