- 44 cups of flour
- 36 large brown eggs
- 32 cups of white sugar
- 16 cups of brown sugar
Plus cocoa, vanilla, cherries and more butter than it should be legal to buy or mention in a parenting magazine. Seriously, so much butter.
This is a conservative estimate of my holiday baking grocery list.
If you showed up at my house the weekend I call “Cookiepalooza,” you’d see cookies in all stages of life. The ingredients stacked up on the raised bar in my kitchen, dough in the fridge and in mixing bowls waiting for their turn in the oven and oh-so-many baked cookies cooling on the counter, the kitchen table (expanded to double its regular size) and even the basement.
I make at least 3-4 batches of at least 6-8 varieties, depending on how ambitious I’m feeling that year. Some years I make even more.
It’s a seasonal sickness. And it’s so well-known that last year, it made our creative director think: What if we photographed some of your holiday cookies and did a big photo feature of them for the December issue next year?
That nugget of a notion is this month’s cover story. One year in the making. Most of them are cookies I’ve been baking since I was a kid, alongside my mother.
Every year, I make the cherry cordial cookies, featured on our cover, from a faded, dog-eared recipe card passed down from my grandmother to my mother to me. They are a staple. Same for the gingerbread man sandwich cookies. Trust me when I tell you: They really are the best gingerbread cookies in the world. If you are feeling holiday cookie ambitious this year, you should make a batch.
But don’t worry, even if you hardly ever bake or aren’t about to buy 72 sticks of butter (obscene, right?), there is a Christmas cookie in this issue for you. And if you’re looking for Hanukkah recipes or other seasonal treats, we’ve got those too. Head to MetroParent.com/Cookies for something sweet for everyone this season.
Happy Holidays!
