A Holiday🎄Cookie Bake 🍪 & Sing-Along - No. 173

5 recipes! You’ll need butter, sugar, flour, eggs and the key of middle C

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder or with these Chocolate Pinwheels, the holder. They please cookie lovers of all ages and seem simply miraculous. Listen to Es ist ein Ros entsprungen from Dresden while you spiral these German-American cookies.

A CHRISTMAS COOKIE TO a three-year-old is all about the sprinkles. Each year about this time, I turn three all over again.

Or six or eight or one of those magical ages when every cookie looks beautiful. No Martha Stewart perfection at our house! We eat the broken ones, the burnt edges, the Santa with blue hair—all of them.

Fruit cakes were baked for Christmas giving and wrapped in red cellophane when I grew up in middle Tennessee. A chocolate or orange cake might be baked on Christmas Eve morning, but the cookies were for us.

Hidden in deep metal tins lined with waxed paper were bells, stars, angels, crescent cookies, and rum balls. Unmarked, you weren’t sure which tins had the sugar cookies until you opened the one with the rum balls, and it knocked you across the room. ‘’How do adults eat this stuff?’’ you wondered.

Time flies.

Brought in the A Team last year. Well, to be honest, with the chief decorators holidaying elsewhere, I was happy to have help! They’re brushing Kathleen’s Sugar Cookies with egg white, and then sprinkling on the sprinkles any way they like. It’s zenful, and a little sinful, too. What else but White Christmas for decorating sugar cookies? Go with Bing or White Christmas from The Drifters.

Even if we can’t turn back our physical clocks, baking Christmas cookies lets me drift back in time to Christmases past of my own youth and preparing for the holiday with children.

And in spite of the multitude of cookie recipes out there, I keep coming back to the greatest hits, the sugar and gingerbread cookies that have to be baked each year, and a cookie out of remembrance, so that’s my grandmother’s cheese and date cookies.

It’s fun, too, to surprise my family, so each year I pull in something new, and this year it’s the chocolate pinwheel cookies because they’re just so beautiful on the platter, and something for my Jewish friends and me—rugelach filled with apricot preserves.

Best of all, these recipes are made from the basics, staple ingredients you already know you need in house. I am not sending you clear across town for a certain kind of salt. This is not the year for expensive cookie recipes. The pinwheels call for a square of Baker’s unsweetened chocolate, simple stuff.