Hinotori
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Favorite Homemade Cookies
- Thread starter JanetMarie
- Start date
Hinotori
Sustainability Master
- Joined
- Nov 2, 2011
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- Points
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- Location
- On the foot of Mt Rainier zone 8b
Mom has been making cookies for everyone as family gifts since I was little. It started out because they had little money to spend. She's been doing it over 40 years now.
Was 12 different cookies at one point, plus rum balls and caramels. Now it's usually just the sugar cookies everyone fights over and caramels.
Everyone would also get an old fashioned fruitcake as well. Not the recipes from prohibition onward, but an older recipe that was given to her by a childless client when she first was a hairdresser. So it uses candied fruit (no peels) and a variety of nuts. Moist cake and lots of rum. Takes 8 weeks to ripen and that is 4 cheesecloth soakings and rewrappings with rum. Tastes nothing like store fruitcake or what I've had at friends houses. Even fruitcake hating family always wanted one.
Apparently there have been verbal fights amongst the cousins over the sugar cookies. Everyone hopes they are at my great aunts' houses when Mom shows up with the cookies.
Mom can't physically stand to make it all anymore. She has quit the fruitcakes now as they are too expensive and that was with her candying her own pineapple 2 years ago because she couldn't find any and I had to search up a good recipe for that. Bulk candied fruit wasn't available here this year so my youngest brother has been pouting as she didn't make any again. She hasn't told him I have the recipe and have made it before.
She did cookie trees for the 2nd year for the kids. Graduated snowflake sugar cookies. Mom frosts them green with colored sprinkles and gives the girls a piping bag of frosting to put them together. The kids love them.
Was 12 different cookies at one point, plus rum balls and caramels. Now it's usually just the sugar cookies everyone fights over and caramels.
Everyone would also get an old fashioned fruitcake as well. Not the recipes from prohibition onward, but an older recipe that was given to her by a childless client when she first was a hairdresser. So it uses candied fruit (no peels) and a variety of nuts. Moist cake and lots of rum. Takes 8 weeks to ripen and that is 4 cheesecloth soakings and rewrappings with rum. Tastes nothing like store fruitcake or what I've had at friends houses. Even fruitcake hating family always wanted one.
Apparently there have been verbal fights amongst the cousins over the sugar cookies. Everyone hopes they are at my great aunts' houses when Mom shows up with the cookies.
Mom can't physically stand to make it all anymore. She has quit the fruitcakes now as they are too expensive and that was with her candying her own pineapple 2 years ago because she couldn't find any and I had to search up a good recipe for that. Bulk candied fruit wasn't available here this year so my youngest brother has been pouting as she didn't make any again. She hasn't told him I have the recipe and have made it before.
She did cookie trees for the 2nd year for the kids. Graduated snowflake sugar cookies. Mom frosts them green with colored sprinkles and gives the girls a piping bag of frosting to put them together. The kids love them.
FarmerJamie
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Great memories. Both grandma's did table loads of holiday cookies every year. Had the tradition going with kids up to the divorce.
Only thing I want these days that I make is lemon bars from my mom's recipe.
Only thing I want these days that I make is lemon bars from my mom's recipe.
flowerbug
Sustainability Master
we make domino bars which are a thick lemon filling in the middle and chocolate on either side of that. very hard for either of us to resist.
Trying2keepitReal
Almost Self-Reliant
We like fudge here as well. And a cookie we call crinkle cookies, you use a cake mix, oil and eggs and roll in powder sugar before you bake.
The Porch
Super Self-Sufficient
I have never made fudge, DH loves brownies,
My grandma Cookie use to make pecan divinity, fudge, peanut brittle, snickerdoodle, iced sugar cookies, ginger bread cookies, fruit cake,
she would put out ribbon candy & this plastic tree with spiced sugar gum drops stuck to it ,
Eeee Vermont Counter Store has one!!!
https://www.vermontcountrystore.com/christmas-gumdrop-tree-set/product/H5041
She really put out the mother load. She always had a christmas village with a glass mirror for a pond, she really loved Christmas. She had those little red and white caroler candles, santa mugs,
Britesea
Sustainability Master
sigh... my family didn't do much. We put up a tree when I was small. I remember when I was 14, I found out my parents weren't going to get a tree anymore. I saved up my allowance and got a friend's mom to take me downtown and I bought a small tree. Took it home and decorated it while the parents were at a party. After that, the price went up on trees and I couldn't afford it anymore, so we didn't have anything in the way of holiday decorating anymore. She wasn't much on baking cookies or anything either. So all our current "traditions" are ones I started myself when I grew up.
frustratedearthmother
Sustainability Master
My mom would occasionally make fruitcake cookies and would apply the booze liberally, lol. I remember taking some to a high school football game and feeling like we needed to hide them because people seated around us kept asking who brought the booze!
Britesea
Sustainability Master
I used to make something we called Stained Glass cookies: A refrigerator dough filled with candied fruit. Chilled, then sliced thinly enough so the pieces of fruit looked like stained glass pieces framed by the dough. Very pretty, and tasty. Don't make them these days as the candied fruit is too much for my diabetes
