When Rachel and I were assigned our task of Christmas Baking, Rachel hit upon the idea of integrating this with our daily agency 3.30 snack time. But why let everyone else get off so lightly? We should make people work for their snacks,
I declared.

Following Rachel’s cries of “my cooking is shocking”, it was left to me to swiftly turn to my mum for guidance. With my mum’s cookie cookbook in hand I
went to work.

Makes 30 (right – better use a small cookie cutter if I’m going to get enough for the whole agency)

· 3/4 cup unsalted butter (cooking in cups the American way is so much more sensible than faffing around with weighing scales the British way)

· 1 1/4 cups sugar

· 1 egg

· 1 egg yolk

· 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

· grated rind of 1 lemon

· pinch of salt

· sprinkle of cinnamon

· 2 1/2 cups all purpose flour (No idea what all-purpose means.
Is it the same as plain? Not the same as self-raising? All well, take a punt).

· for decoration: coloured icing, silver balls, hundred and thousands.

With an electric mixer cream the butter until soft. Add the sugar gradually and continue beating until light and fluffy. Using a wooden spoon slowly mix in the whole egg and the egg yolk. Add the vanilla extract, lemon rind and salt. Stir to mix well. Sift the flour over the mixture and stir to blend. Gather the dough in to a ball, wrap in cling film and chill for 30-60 mins. Preheat the oven to 375F/ 190C. On a flouted surface roll out the dough until about 1/8 inch thick. Stamp out shapes with floured cookie cutters. Bake for about 8 mins until lightly coloured/ golden. Allow to cool before decorating.

So the clue lay in the final ingredient in the recipe. Let’s get everyone to decorate their own Christmas cookie! The brief to everyone was to decorate a cookie with something that represented them, or in reality with whatever came in to their heads. Have a look at some of the video to see the amusing results! My personal favourite being the Mexican cookie…

Untitled from The Golden Gnome on Vimeo.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 17th, 2008at 2:37 pm and is filed under Christmas 2008. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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