So it snowed here in Seattle on Saturday.
To celebrate, I made a batch of iced sugar cookies with snowflakes on them.

The first cookies of the Christmas season!

I have always been a big fan of snow.
Snow days and snowflakes and snowmen are some of my favourite things.

Something about a cotton filled sky and a landscape of white just makes everything look happy and festive. It makes me want to turn off the TV and curl up infront of the window and watch the fluffy stuff accumulate on the green grass below, with a mug of hot cocoa at my side. Part of my inner child craves snow. I was always the kid who would run out into the snow in the middle of the night if I saw that it was snowing. I would spend my days making snowpeople and snow angels and catching snowflakes on my tongue while praying that the snow would keep going just one more day.

…And just one more day after that.

Snowdays were a hot commodity for school children.

I was lucky as a kid. I had my best friend living just down the road from me. Even though we lived in the middle of nowhere, we could manage walking to each other’s houses, so long as the snow wasn’t too packed, slick, or ice covered. I can remember many instances where my face, elbows and butt made quick contact with the ice covered snow when I wasn’t being very careful.

The long winter season in the northwest provided us much time to cultivate a system for lowering ice caused accidents while walking from place to place. Within this system, there were three guidelines-

Walk hard. Step down heel first.
Walk slow. Keep your feet shoulders width apart and brace yourself between steps for the possibility of slippage.
Carry a big stick. Roosevelt had this part right, as a big stick makes you into an instant walking tripod, and with a steady base, its nearly impossible to fall.

There were still accidents though. Like the time I didn’t realize that our porch steps were shiny because the snow on them had melted and then frozen again. Yeah, I was really glad that we only had 5 steps, but I was even more grateful that I only made contact with two of them as I fell to the fluffy snow below. Ouch.

My best friend was a little more prepared, it seemed. Her parents had moved to our neighbourhood from Minnesota a few years before she was born, and since the winters were much more harsh where they were from, they came with full winter battle regalia, a regular snow-pocalypse preparation kit. The day she made her way to my house in snowshoes, I seriously wondered why she had strapped tennis racquets to her shoes. The fact that she was wearing some strange polar ice cap rated snow suit was beside the point.

I was fairly comfortable in my jeans over sweatpants over leggings over bike shorts- situation, with my winter coat, which was sort of like a fleece lined windbreaker. I had a pair of gloves, but they were useless to me as they became waterlogged after one snowball had been formed, so they went on the ground, where I’d plan on picking them up later, but forget about on my way back into the house, so they’d stay there until the snow melted.

My mom was prepared for my daily snow outings. She set up a ‘decontamination’ station in the entryway of the house, laying out a layer of black plastic sheeting from the doorway to the heater, about 10 ft away, and setting up a quilt drying rack for me to lay my clothes on as I shed my layers of snow drenched clothing. I wasn’t allowed to set foot in the house until she set up this area, and I had to shake as much of the loose snow off of myself before even entering the prepared area. Anything to keep from dampening the carpets I guess.

For me, snow days were all about fun, freedom and friends, so when I see snowflakes, I’m reminded of those three things.

My snowflake adorned sugar cookies were simple to make, and could easily be decorated in a multitude of different ways.

So here is the recipe-

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup powdered sugar
2 teaspoons almond extract
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
3 cups all purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt

In a medium sized bowl, whisk the butter and sugar together until fluffy. Add the sugars, flavouring, and eggs, and whisk thoroughly. Add the flour, baking soda and salt (I put the baking soda and salt on top of the flour and sort of stir it around before mixing all of the dry ingredients with the soft ingredients) and mix together using a spoon (wooden or plastic, just not a whisk). Dough will be soft and slightly sticky. Scrape all of dough onto a sheet of waxed paper and fold waxed paper over the dough. Refrigerate for about an hour.

Preheat oven to 350. With clean hands, roll a heaping teaspoon full of dough into a ball and place on an ungreased cookie sheet. Make sure each dough ball is about an inch and a half away from the dough ball next to it. With cleaned and dried hands, press down on the top of each dough ball to flatten it slightly before baking. It will take anywhere from 6-10 minutes for the cookies to bake through. When the edges of the bottom of the cookie start to turn golden brown, pull the cookies from the oven. Either use multiple cookie sheets or allow the cookie sheet to cool between batches (otherwise the bottoms of the cookies will burn).

For icing, you have a few options.

If you are planning to give these cookies as packaged gifts, you might want to decorate them with royal icing, which is a thin icing that hardens as it dries so that when packaged, the icing is more sturdy and difficult to break. Recipes are available *HERE* .

If you’re planning on just eating them yourself or perhaps bringing them to a party, or some other use where they’re not really going to spend much time being looked at before being snarfed down, I’d suggest either using regular buttercream, cream cheese or boiled frosting.

If you’re looking for a thin icing that tastes better than royal icing (and isn’t made with egg whites or meringue powder) You can use this recipe from my archives that I’ve used on many occasions to decorate sugar cookies with very good results (there is also another recipe for sugar cookies on there, if you’re looking to make rolled sugar cookies).

Although the snow melted away nearly as fast as it came, for a few brief moments I found myself gazing out the window with the same seasonal excitement that I felt as a child on a snow day. I hope it snows again, it would be a wonderful year for a white Christmas!

-A

P.S. If you’re looking for ideas for packaging cookies for shipping, here is a link to some helpful tips and tricks!

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 1st, 2008 at 3:26 am and is filed under December 2007. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.