Inspired by conversations on the Food52 Hotline, we're sharing tips and tricks that make navigating all of our kitchens easier and more fun.
Today: Alison Roman, the senior associate food editor of Bon Appétit, shares her holiday cookie strategies.
If you’re like me, by the start of holiday season you’ve already promised a few hundred people Christmas cookies, but have approximately zero time to deliver on said promises. It’s not like there were 11 months to prepare for what will be weeks of non-stop holiday parties, cookie swaps, and other festive gatherings, right? So here we are again: flour in all corners of your kitchen, mixing bowls piling up in the sink, cookie dough on your clothes, tearing apart kitchen cabinets at some unholy hour to find those damn Christmas tree cookie cutters, because you know you just saw them the other day...
Well, this year things are going to be different. This year I’m going to clean out my freezer to make room for logs of chocolate-pistachio cookie dough, because they’ll keep up to one month that way. I’ll buy the proper air-tight containers to make sure none of those molasses cookies I slaved over (2 weeks ago) go stale. My thumbprints will already be baked before the first snow falls, and my sugar cookies will already all be cut out and frozen, ready to be decorated before the first party invite hits my inbox.
So imagine this year, being here: Welcoming drop-in guests with freshly baked shortbread (pulled from the freezer) and impressing friends with freshly iced (but previously baked) sugar cookies, all while maintaining respectable levels of sanity. Sounds glorious, doesn’t it?
What are your holiday cookie tips? Let us know in the comments!
Photos by Michael Graydon + Nikole Herriot
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