Choose Taste Over Icing When Making Holiday Cookies

With the exception of my stepmother, who can whip up a towering Coconut Cake from scratch (she grates the coconut herself), I do not come from a family of bakers. Around the holidays, my mom would lay out sheets of store-bought cookie dough and plunk a bowl of cookie cutters on the table. We would decorate the shapes with candy, pressing it into the raw dough before it went into the oven. This gave the cookies a somewhat mottled appearance, but we didn’t mind the melted M&M’s and cinnamon candies—if properly placed, it looked like the snowmen and Santas were bleeding from the eyes, which I, at 7, thought was “very cool.”

And while I love watching cookie decorating videos on my phone, I have no desire to mess with royal icing—I don’t really care what cookies look like, I just want them to taste good. I recently made Fregolotta, a rustic Venetian cookie that eats like a buttery streusel topping. In terms of aesthetics, it’s as far away from iced gingerbread and cookie cutters as you can get. The dough is gently pressed into a sheet pan, then baked and broken into shards once cooled. I plan to make another batch for the cookie swap at my gym, along with our Tahini and Browned Butter Cookies, which look chic but not fussy when dipped in chocolate and sprinkled with sesame seeds.

My dad’s family made candy around Christmas, though the words “made” and “candy” are a slight stretch. Our specialties included haystacks (a package of melted butterscotch morsels mixed with a bag of chow mein noodles, then dolloped on wax paper to set), something we called “pretzel candy” (set mini pretzel twists on a baking tray, put a Rolo on top of the pretzel, pop it in the oven to soften the Rolo then press a pecan half on top of that), and “fudge” made with sweetened condensed milk and a bag of chocolate chips (melted in the microwave). All of it was more home-assembled than truly homemade, though it was still delicious.

I didn’t realize it until much later, but my family’s fudge is more like Brigadeiros than fudge. The Brazilian chocolate candy is made by cooking sweetened condensed milk, cocoa powder and butter in a nonstick pan until it slides around the pan. (The Milk Street version includes cinnamon and instant espresso for heightened flavor.) The cooled mixture traditionally is rolled into balls and coated with chocolate sprinkles, but we like cashews. You can use whatever sprinkle or nut you desire.

I’ll be spending the week of Christmas with my family in South Carolina. I want to make our Peanut Butter Miso Cookies for my stepdad—he loves everything peanut butter—and a batch of our Cinnamon Sugar Yogurt Doughnuts on Christmas morning. Unlike yeasted doughnuts, these only take 40 minutes start to finish. I also want to show my mom how to make Churros in her air fryer (she loves that thing).

But the baking I’m most excited to do is with my niece. She’s nearly three, and loves helping out in the kitchen, so I’m going to teach her how to make our 1-2-3-4 Yogurt Cake. Based on the French gâteau au yaourt, it uses an entire container of yogurt then cleverly employs the empty container as the measuring cup for the flour, sugar and oil. I’m sure we’ll decorate it with frosting and red and green M&M’s. Maybe a few cinnamon candies. Family tradition and all that.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.