Have you ever felt that your personal touch and real love somehow got lost despite trying to find the perfect gift for your loved ones or friends, or even though you bought them the most beautiful or expensive items? On the other hand, your most sincere feelings and care that you put into a small, hand-made gift somehow gave more happiness to your nearest and dearest? Here is a beautiful gift idea for Christmas this year to make your loved ones and friends happy, or to thank your or your children’s teachers perhaps. This simple cookie box will not only put a smile on the face of whoever receives it, but I guarantee it will be so much fun preparing it while spending quality time together in the kitchen.
I also started to make this cookie recipe as a little girl with my grandmother when we were preparing for Christmas. As a typical city girl, I always slept until 10 am, but these days I didn’t need an alarm to get up at 7; I was up already because of the excitement. Of course, by the time I woke up, grandma had already prepared all the ingredients on the big table; I just had to measure them according to what she dictated.
We split the ingredients into a small and a bigger bowl. Since we made cookies for the entire family, we always made a double portion, but my hands were so tiny that I couldn’t knead the whole dough by myself. I loved imitating my grandmother’s movements as she incorporated the butter into the flour. There was something heavenly and wonderful about how she worked with her wrinkly hands. Somehow the knowledge of five generations came to life, as she also had learned this recipe from her grandmother.
During the morning, we prepared the dough and baked the cookies. But the fun part came after lunch when I sat at the table, and for hours and hours, I decorated the cookies. The pastry is a very millimetric, almost mathematical science, so when my granny said, “use your imagination freely”, I was over the moon. Somehow, I have always had an immeasurable patience for meticulous handwork: I loved preparing the frostings of different colours, placing the decorations on separate small plates (at the time, of course, I didn’t know that there was a professional term for this: mise-en-place) and decorating the cookies one by one.
When I finished everything, we carefully packed them into a beautiful, colourful Christmas box, which we placed under the decorated Christmas tree. Since then, not a year has passed without making this recipe. Of course, as with all other baked goods, as the years passed and grandma got older, she no longer felt like spending hours in the kitchen. That’s when the family decided that I would be the one to take over the baking traditions in the family. But like all other recipes I learned from her and my mother, I tweaked it to my own taste. This includes all the years of travellings, experience and gastronomic curiosity that characterized my last 15 years. That’s how I left the store-bought green, red and blue food colouring and replaced it with chocolate glaze and natural lemon juice.
Make some tradition
But to see how the traditions of decades cannot erase their traces, when I showed my mother the photo of the Christmas cookie box I made for the family this year, her first question was: no green pine tree cookies? Hhhmm, not this year…
This year I give more space to my creativity to build something based on tradition. I also encourage you to use your imagination, invite your relatives or friends, put on an apron, and create traditions together. It’s the best way to spend some time with your kids, family or friends, and I guarantee you will feel loved by the end of the day. After all, Christmas is all about love.
How to assemble the cookie box
You don’t have to overthink the process: a simple shoebox will do perfectly. Cut the sides of the box to a height of about 5-7 cm, and from the remaining part, cut strips of the same width; these will be the dividers between the compartments. Think about how many types of cookies you will put in the box and cut out the correct number of divisions accordingly. Wrap the outside of the box with beautiful wrapping paper, place baking paper/wrapping paper on the inside bottom of the box and finally, set the dividers. Now fill the box with the cookies.
If you are up to some savory dessert in your cookie box, check out my sausage and cheese medialuna recipe. Also mind-blowingly delicious.
Christmas cookie box
Ingredients
Ingredients for the dough
- 300 g flour
- 200 g butter cold and cut into small cubes
- 100 g powdered sugar
- 1 lemon zest
Ingredients for decoration (use your creativity freely)
- 50 g walnut/pecan roughly chopped
- 2 tbsp granulated sugar
- 2 tbsp powder sugar
- 1 small jar jam
- chocolate glaze
- 2 tbsp candied orange
- 1 lime juice
- 1 stem rosemary
- Christmas cookie decoration
Instructions
- Put all ingredients in a mixing bowl and make very quick movements to combine them until they come together as a dough.
- Chill the dough in the fridge for half an hour-hour.
- Heat the oven to 175 °C.
- Roll out the dough to 5 mm/0,2 inches thick on a floured surface with a rolling pin. Cut the dough with the cookie cutter you would like and place them on a baking tray.
- Bake the cookies for 8-10 mins (they have to be slightly light brown).
Variations & decorations
- Sugar & nut (when you've cut the dough with the cookie cutter, brush them with egg white and sprinkle them with a mix of roughly chopped nut and granulated sugar, place them on the baking tray and bake them).
- Thumbprint (form small balls of the dough and sprinkle them with a little bit of granulated sugar, make a small indentation with your thumb in each cookie, fill them with jam and bake them).
- Linzer (once you've rolled out the dough, you have to cut the top and the bottom: for the bottom, cut out circles, for the top, cut out the circles' center with a smaller heart/star-shaped cutter. Once baked, spread a teaspoon of jam over the bottom, sprinkle the tops with powdered sugar and sandwich them together).
- Chocolate & candied orange (glaze the baked cookies with chocolate and sprinkle them with finely chopped candied orange).
- Lemon & rosemary (glaze the baked cookies with a mix of lemon juice and powdered sugar (2-3 tbsp of lemon juice and 3-4 tbsp. powdered sugar) and sprinkle with finely chopped fresh rosemary).
- You can create an infinite number of glazes with powdered sugar and food colouring, and decorate the cookies with the Christmas decoration you want.
