Warm up the cold winter days by baking rose cardamom sugar cookies
These tasty treats have one foot in the winter holidays, while inching the other toward spring
Of all the cookie recipes I have created, these rose cardamom sugar cookies are by far my favorite. Photo by Lauren J. Mapp |
“Why do you like to make holiday cookies?” my husband Peter asked late one night this month.
It was almost midnight, and I was baking my final batch of cookies — peanut butter with chocolate chunks — before starting to box up this year’s collection of cookies to drop off for friends and family ahead of our trip to the East Coast for Christmas.
Every holiday season for the past decade or so, I spend the weeks leading up to Christmas baking batches of cookies to create cookie boxes to gift to friends and family. But until my husband asked me about it the other week, I had never really thought about why I make a point to bake around this time of year.
In answering Peter’s question, I reflected back on all the special Christmases with my parents growing up.
In the years I spent the holidays at my mom’s house, we made chocolate chip cookies and decorated sugar cookie snowmen. We usually went to a party at my grandma’s or one of my aunts’ houses, where there would be an even wider array of treats, like my Aunt Dee’s “presents” — sugar cookies decorated with red and green frosting filled with Andes mint bars.
When it was my dad’s turn to host my brother and I for Christmas, we made indulgent monster cookies in a giant tupperware container overflowing with M&Ms, peanut butter and chocolate chips. We’d also bake my Granny Mapp’s pound cake or a cheesecake to have for dessert during the week my brother Daniel and I would spend there for the holidays.
Call me greedy or gluttonous, but I always wanted to have a selection of all the desserts around the holidays. More than anything, I dreamt of sharing all those fuzzy memories with everyone I held dear to my heart.
This is an excerpt from my newest food writing project, San Diego Tides & Tacos. Visit this article on Substack to read more and learn how to make my rose cardamom sugar cookies, and please consider subscribing to receive the newsletter when it's published each week.
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