Exploring San Diego County one restaurant at a time

Manly memories: Christmas sugar cookies

Finished Christmas sugar cookie we made from my grandmother's recipe. These are on white plates set on a blue background. The cookies have a classic, tan sugar cookie look with blue and white icing. Some designs include my initials, initials of my parents, grandmother, stars and moon, sun, whale and pearls decorated with sprinkles around them.

The thrill of cooking

The ingredients for making Grandma Manly's Christmas cookies: (From left to right) Food coloring, butter, sprinkles, flour, baking powder, eggs, salt, sugar, powdered sugar, buttermilk and cream of tartar.

This week, I’m sharing my mom’s favorite recipe from my grandmother’s baking: Christmas sugar cookies. Every 4th post on my blog, I’ll talk about a more personal cooking memory for me.

My grandmother, Florence Manly did an incredible amount of fantastic baking for her community in Canton, Ohio. My mother has told me stories about how she baked for church events, school events and, of course, around the holidays. She would make hundreds of Christmas cookies and dozens of pies for friends and family. 

Read more below about a Manly family memory and what inspires me to cook and find great food.

Cookies

The finished Christmas cookies with icing. They are sitting on a prepared plate with 3 cookies in the center that read Best San Diego Eats. There ae coastal designs made with baby blue icing. One is of a whale, there is a sun, another wave/beach-like design and one with jimmy sprinkles.

Christmas cookies are my mom’s favorite family recipe from my grandmother. My grandmother was given the recipe by my mom’s first-grade teacher, Mrs. Long. She lived in the same neighborhood and shared recipes with my grandmother.

It was a tradition for me as a kid to make these cookies around the holidays. I would help my mother gather the ingredients to make the dough, and it would form in the Kitchenaid into a light, fluffy batter. It would look like soft bread dough, and we would use molds to make shapes of Santa, sleighs, Christmas trees and stars.

After baking in the oven, we would ice and put colored sprinkles on them. The trick to making these sugar cookies delicious is keeping in the oven long enough to crisp on the outside while staying chewy on the inside. Finding a happy medium was difficult for my mom because if you cooked them too long, the outside of the cookie burns. This simple recipe can be deceptively difficult.

When I would go to my grandma’s house, Florence would have the dining table packed with all sorts of treats. There were jelly beans, Christmas cookies perfectly baked and chocolate from a local Canton favorite, Heggy’s Chocolate.

Fun Facts

A photo of a cutting board with a rolling pin. There is a piece of dough with cut-out circles. Off to the right is a circle metal cookie cutter. Off to the left is a marble, dough rolling pin. There is flour along the cutting board.

These cookies, if un-iced, are almost like biscuits. They crumble in your mouth and have a lovely buttery texture as you eat them.

My grandfather liked the cookies without the icing. Eating them this way is the more traditional way of having them. They closely resemble Nazareth sugar cookies, a type created by Moravians or German Protestant settlers in the 1700s. They lived in the town of Nazareth, Pennsylvania. 

Sometimes they are also referred to as Amish sugar cookies. It makes sense to me because my grandfather liked going to Amish country, and I remember a couple of times as a kid on our Christmas vacation going to a nearby Amish town for the day.

Pennsylvania borders Ohio, and it’s plausible Mrs. Long’s recipe was from an Amish cookbook or passed down through relatives, friends, or friends of friends from Amish country.

Grandma Manly’s Cookie Recipe

Ingredients:

Picture of Florence Manly and Bill Manly in their home on their living room couch. Florence is on the left with fuzzy dark hair, big glasses, puffy eyes and a smile. Bill has squinted eyes, gray hair and glasses in his shirt pocket. They both have on white shirts and are in their 70s.

For cookies

  • 5 cups flour
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 cup soft unsalted butter
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 tsp. baking powder
  • 2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 tsp. vanilla 
  • ¼ tsp. salt

For icing

  • 4 cups powdered or confectioner’s sugar
  • 3 eggs, beaten
  • 1/2 tsp. cream of tartar
  • Salt to taste

Tip: This recipe will make more than a few cookies. If you only want a few of these, I suggest halving the above measurements or freezing some of the dough.

Directions:

  1. Beat sugar and butter together until light and fluffy
  2. Add vanilla and beat in eggs, one at a time
  3. In a separate bowl, mix salt, flour and baking powder
  4. In a separate small bowl, combine buttermilk and baking soda; then add to the flour mixture
  5. Mix flour and buttermilk with the sugar and butter
  6. The mixture may turn out sticky. At this stage, you will roll out the dough, preferably on a ¾’’ inch board and make it into Christmas-themed shapes. It is essential to keep enough flour (1-2 cups) by your rolling board and as needed to roll out the dough. The dough should be soft.
  7. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees and grease a couple of cookie sheets.
  8. Dip your cookie cutters in flour, cut out your molds from the dough and place them onto the cookie sheets.
  9. Once a cookie sheet is complete, place it in the oven for approximately 10 minutes, or the bottom starts to brown. If you want a crisper cookie, leave it in the oven a bit longer.
  10.  Place finished cookies on a baking rack and cool.
  11. Place icing ingredients in a medium bowl and whisk vigorously until smooth. If you want different colors for your icing, add smaller amounts to different bowls on the side. The amount for this icing recipe was good for about two dozen cookies.
  12. Add icing and colored sugar or sprinkles. Piping bags and small metal tips with fine nozzles are recommended for easier cookie decorating.
The process of icing the cookies. There is a baking sheet tray on a tablecloth filled with cookies. A piping bag is laying on the uniced cookies with baby blue icing. The cookies toward the back have white icing, the cookies toward the front are decorated with blue icing. There are intricate designs on some of the cookies in front. They are works in progress at this point.

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A picture of my grandfather on my dad's side at the San Diego Zoo. He's in the gorilla cutout they used to have ear the gorillas in which he is smiling in place of the gorilla's head. His smile is almost forced and it looks like a hot day. The gorilla is black with some whitening of the painted sign from the sun. There are blue plants in the backdrop of the gorilla.

I hope you enjoyed this personal story. This photo is of my grandfather on my dad’s side. I was going through a photo box of his with my dad a couple weeks ago and found a few photos of my mom’s grandparents. He took the picture of them above in their home when he visited them in Canton, Oh.

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Be sure to check back next week for a post about Spirito’s, a great Italian diner in Carlsbad!

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