This 2002 episode features Arlene’s first Christmas season in the new “brown kitchen” or “apple kitchen.” She’s baking some favorite Christmas cookies from her second cookbook, At Home With Family and Friends. Thankfully, you don’t need the cookbook to make these cookies, and we’ve got all the recipes right here! Enjoy her buttery oatmeal dainty lace cookies, her chewy chocolate cookies, the addicting brutzel bars made with butter, sugar, chocolate, and saltine crackers, and the festive creamy wafers sandwich cookies.
Dainty Lace Cookies
The dough for these buttery oatmeal cookies makes big bubbles in the oven, resulting in pretty holes, like a snowflake.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup butter
- 1/3 cup flour, sifted
- 1 cup quick cooking oatmeal (plain)
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 1/4 tsp salt
- 2 tbsp milk
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour baking sheets. Shake off excess flour.
- In a saucepan, melt butter. Stir in remaining ingredients, mixing until well combined. Drop batter by teaspoonfuls about 3-inches apart onto prepared baking sheets. Press cookies with an offset spatula or the back of a spoon until very, very thin. To prevent sticking, grease the back of the spatula or spoon.
- In preheated oven, bake 5 to 7 minutes, checking regularly, until edges are brown. Remove from oven and let stand about 1 minute before touching. Remove cookies carefully from baking sheets using a wide spatula and transfer to racks to cool completely. Cookies will be thin and lacy. Makes about 3 dozen cookies. Enjoy!
Chewy Chocolate Cookies
A perfect cookie for Christmas or anytime!
Ingredients
- 1 1/4 cups softened butter (unsalted)
- 2 cups sugar
- 2 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- 2 cups flour
- 3/4 cup cocoa powder
- 1 tsp baking soda
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 1 cup finely chopped walnuts (optional)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- In a Preheat large oven howl to 350 using an degrees. electric mixer, cream butter and sugar. Add eggs and vanilla and heat until mixture is creamy.
- In another bowl, blend flour, cocoa, baking soda and salt. Add these ingredients to butter mixture, blending well. Stir in nuts, if desired.
- Drop by teaspoonfuls onto ungreased cookie sheets. Bake in preheated oven for 8 or 9 minutes. Do not overbake. Cookies will 9 puff during baking, flatten upon cooling. This is a soft, chewy cookie.
- Let cool on cookie sheet until set, about 2 minutes, then transfer to wire racks to cool completely. Makes about 4½ dozen cookies. Enjoy!
Creamy Wafers
Creamy icing sandwiched between flaky butter cookies makes these irresistible.
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 1/3 cup heavy whipping cream
- 2 cups flour
- white or colored sugar (for sprinkling)
- 1/4 cup butter
- 3/4 cup powdered sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
Instructions
- For the filling: combine 1/4 cup butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla extract and cream with an electric mixer until smooth and fluffy. Add red and green food coloring, if desired.
- For the wafers: Preheat oven to 375 degrees. In a bowl using a pastry cutter, mix butter, whipping cream and flour thoroughly. Wrap dough and chill 2 hours.
- Divide dough into 3 parts. On a lightly floured surface, roll 1 part of dough out to about 1/8-inch thickness. Cut into ½-inch rounds. Keep remaining dough chilled until ready to use.
- Place cookies on ungreased baking sheet and sprinkle tops with sugar. Prick cookies with fork about 4 times. Bake in preheated oven for 7 to 9 minutes, or just until set, but NOT brown. Cool cookies completely on wire racks.
- Spread Creamy Filling on non-sugared side one cookie and top it with another cookie, placing the non-sugared side of cookie on filling. If filling is too thick to spread easily, it can be thinned with a tiny bit of milk. Makes about 2½ dozen cookie sandwiches. Enjoy!
Brutzel Bars
Buttery, caramel-y, chocolate-y, and utterly addicting, everyone loves these easy-to-make treats.
Ingredients
- Nonstick cooking spray
- 1 package saltine crackers
- 1 cup butter (salted)
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 package chocolate chips (12 oz., milk or dark)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a standard-sized cookie sheet that has built up sides with aluminum foil. Lightly spray the foil with cooking spray.
- Arrange saltine crackers over foil to make a single layer. Cut crackers to fill in gaps where whole crackers will not fit. Set aside.
- In a medium saucepan, combine butter and sugar and bring to a boil. Boil 1 minute. Remove from heat and pour gently over crackers, spreading the mixture to cover every single one evenly.
- Bake in preheated oven for 10 minutes or until lightly golden brown. Do not allow to get dark brown, or sugar and butter can burn. Remove from oven and rearrange any crackers that have moved while mixture is still warm and loose.
- Immediately sprinkle chocolate chips evenly over the top of the crackers. Wait 2 to 3 minutes, and the chocolate will begin to soften and melt. Using a spatula or butterknife, spread melted chocolate evenly to cover the crackers. Cool on wire rack, then refrigerate for a few hours. Remove from refrigerator about 15 minutes before serving. Cut or break into pieces. It makes lots. Enjoy!
- *A "Brutzel" boil is a gentle, lazy, bubbling on the surface.
Transcript
- Hello and welcome to At home today, we’re so glad you could drop by, excuse me one minute. I got the little thing going with the throat today so I’m drinking some good green tea with honey, it is soothing. Also looking through the cookbook because isn’t this a great graphic, pies. Sitting right here is the pie that’s on page 272 in this cookbook, it’s called miracle pie. This is the one you put everything in a blender and guess what? You pour it into a pan, no crust no nothing. When it bakes, the crust forms on the bottom, it’s like coconut custard. I’m telling you it’s a great piece of pie and I’m probably not what you should have when you have a sore throat. But sometimes these things just a little taste makes you feel better. Well, it’s the first part of December and you know what time that is on At Home. Cookies, cookies, and more cookies. Because if there’s one thing we’re known for in the Pittsburgh area, it’s our cookies. Paul’s niece recently, a couple of years now, she got married and she said, “Aunt Arlene, the thing I want is for people to remember my cookies.” Well, the aunts all got together, we did 7,000 cookies for her wedding. There was every kind you can imagine and what an array and people, she had the little bags printed up with their names on it, and people took bags full of cookies home with them. I thought that was a great idea. Well, we’re gonna get started with our Christmas cookies, this week and next week, two parts of cookies. These are, in each week we gonna do about four different kinds so we’re going to move fast, I want you to stay with us. Don’t leave, don’t not answer the phone. You know, turn the phone off whatever, but stick with us and we’re gonna tell you also at the end of the program, like we always do how you can get today’s and the whole month’s worth of recipes. From now on, you know, we’re getting prepared, get all the stuff in for baking, this is the time to do it. Start accumulating it and just designate a day each week for a couple of weeks when you’re gonna be doing your cookies and just stick to it no matter what, okay. We’re gonna get started with our cookies in just a minute, stay with us, we’ll be right back. Here’s today’s At home hint. Burned bottoms on cookies are very common, to eliminate the problem just rinse the bottom of the cookie sheet under cold water after each batch or wipe the bottom with a wet towel to cool it off. If you’ve got a helpful hint that you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hint to Cornerstone Television, Wall, Pennsylvania, 15148-1499. The first cookie that we’re starting with is called dainty lace cookies. And if you’ve watched Cornerstone Television, you know, when I mentioned the name of Ruth Fisher, she gave me this recipe. She and her sister used to make them all the time. Simple and easy, but delicious and delicate. In fact, I have some right here if you’d like to take a look at them. This is what we call dainty lace. Isn’t that pretty? These are great for not only Christmas, but they’re great for any kind of a wedding reception or whatever. Simple to do, here I have my half a cup of butter and you cannot substitute anything. It has to be the real butter because this is the flavor that we’re basing the cookie on, all right. And I have taken it off the heat and all it is basically, it’s just adding your other ingredients. This is two tablespoons of milk. I’m gonna pour that in there, okay. We have 3/4 teaspoon of salt, just like that. And what I like and what makes the laces, this is the quick kind of oatmeal, quick cooking kind. Just pour it right in there. We have some sugar, about a half a cup. We have some flour that helps to hold it all together and you can see it’s just a matter of putting everything into this pan, mix it together. This is one of those cookies that, like there’s some cookies that when you’re making a cookie tray, you know you’re going to use, and they’re like the big chocolate chips. They’re going to have a predominance on that tray. Well, these cookies I like to use for accent, like one here, one there, because they’re delicate looking and they’re really quite tasty and you’ll get them coming back and asking for more. But one of the things I used to like that she did, she would take like a coffee can and take the label off. Then she would cover it with a decorative paper and then she would use that can and stack them on top, one on top of the other. She’d make hers about that big. Now, okay this is all there is to this. Now what we’re gonna do is you’re going to drop this onto a greased or buttered and floured cookie sheet, you have to do them both, all right. And you just take, I’m gonna show you, you don’t take a lot ’cause you’re spooning it out. You don’t put them together because these will spread just about like that. I’d probably get maybe, maybe 12 on here, maybe not, okay. And once you do that, then you take the back of the spoon and you press this as flat as you possibly can into a nice round, attractive round shape. Even if you can see that that cookie sheet is coming through, there doesn’t matter. The flatter, the better. This might be a little bit big right here. And just keep pressing. If you have one of those spatulas that goes like this, that’s the perfect tool. Unfortunately I don’t have one here with me today, but that’s the perfect tool to work with this. And these are gonna go into a preheated 325 degree oven. They don’t bake, but about five to seven minutes. And what you’re gonna wanna to do is just keep an eye on them really, really important. And it doesn’t matter if it looks like it’s, you know, there’s a spot there. Because the sugar in the dough is what holds it all together when it cooks ’cause it gets hard, you know, like when you cook sugar, it gets a hard crack. That’s what holds these together. This is delicious. You could drizzle chocolate over the top of these if you wanted, just plain and put some powdered sugar, whatever your heart’s desire. Simple, easy to do, that’s what this is called, Dainty lace cookie, all right. And this makes about three dozen so you can gauge, if you want to make another batch, I would make them one batch at a time. Don’t think, well I’ll double everything. Sometimes that doesn’t work, okay. So it’s important to, we’re going to do these 325 five to seven minutes. All right, now I told you we’re gonna move fast today so hang on to your hats. And let’s go to the next cookie, which is called a Chewy chocolate cookie. This is also from our cookbook and it’s on page 216. Again, we’re just putting everything into our bowl. We’re going to cream 1/4 cups of softened butter with two cups of sugar. Now this makes a lot, if you’re like me, sometimes you like cookies just to make a lot. If you’re gonna give them as gifts you think, “Boy, you know, I’d really, really like to make cookies for so-and-so or some for this person.”, make cookies that give you a lot per batch. And that way you have more to distribute to your friends or to whom you want to give the gift to. Okay, so we’re creaming. Get it going here, then basically all we’re doing after that, I’m going to add two eggs. We’ll do one and two, just like that. And a little bit of two teaspoons of vanilla. We’re gonna add that know there is a difference in imitation vanilla and real vanilla, believe me there is. I tell you that all the time, it’s really important, it’s an investment and it’s worth buying the good stuff, okay. Okay, we’re continuing here. All right, think we’re there. Now, the dry ingredients, which are the flour, we have some baking soda, like so. We have cocoa because these are a chocolate, chocolate cookie. And we have, are really finely done walnuts, very, very finely chopped. And I like to mix those in with that and we’re going to stir it to blend it, okay. And then we’re gonna add, let’s do about half a teaspoon of salt. You say, what do you need to solve for? You know, it’s like, why do you put vanilla in something that’s chocolate? Really? I mean, this is supposed to be a chocolate cookie why did we just put two teaspoons of vanilla? Vanilla just enhances the flavor even of chocolate so it’s a good thing to do. All right, we have the salt here. You say, well there’s salt on the nuts. You’re right, but it’s only a half a teaspoon. So it’s really not going to be that bad. And I’m going to add this, okay. I’m just gonna add some of it because I want to mix it up. If you don’t know if you’re a particular mixture can handle a heavy dough, then just do a part of it ’cause you can always stir in the last bit of your flour mixture, okay. Now these will go in a preheated 350 degree oven and I can’t stress to you how important it is, please make sure that it’s preheated. And they’re gonna bake for about eight or nine minutes and then you leave them on the cookie sheet for a minute to set up, okay. ‘Cause they’ll puff up and then as they cool, they flattened down, all right. Okay. And this is un-grease cookie sheet, you don’t wanna grease the cookie sheet. Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and add the rest of this while you take a break and we’ll be back in just a moment. Well, we’re back with our cookie program today. At least part one of cookies for Christmas, and you can see what a wonderful thick dough, this chocolate chewy cooking presents. And we just put them on an on ungrease cookie sheet and you drop by teaspoons, take two teaspoons, gather as big as you want them and then push them off. You try to kind of make them all about the same size so that they all cook at the same time. When I do that like this, then I look and think, let’s see, does that one look too little? And make your adjustments because you don’t want some that are not done enough in some overdone. Okay, so these are gonna go into the oven very quickly. Linda, maybe you could take that. Our kitchen elves here. All right, now the next one is an old faithful in the cookbook called Brutzel bars. We’ve made these so many times, but they are one of the favorites. I get asked this for this recipe and it really is a big part of our holidays all the time since we first learned about this recipe, it’s just a great one. What we have here cooking is one cup of butter. Again, I cannot stress how important it is, no substitution. Do you know, there’s a lot of water in margarine now. And people write to me all the time saying, well, how come my cookies aren’t turning out anymore? Because there’s a lot of moisture instead of just the butter, they pump it full of liquid. And so as a result, your cookies round all over the sheet, things don’t bake up like they normally would. This is a brutzel, a brutzel boil. This is the sugar and one cup of butter and we bring it on, put it on the stove until it comes to a nice soft, just a real gentle boil. What we’ve done here is taken our cookie sheet. We’ve lined it with foil. We sprayed it with Pam or some kind of a non-stick spray. Then we took Zesta, these are just happened to be Zesta saltines. I use the Keebler club crackers ’cause they have more buttery flavor, but you can use any kind of a cracker and line the entire sheet. Now you can see on the sides here that doesn’t take a full cookie, take your French chef knife and just give it a real quick pop and they’ll cut right in half real even. Mike could attest to thaT, he was surprised at how easily these crackers broke like that. Now all you do really is take this and you’re going to pour it all over the crackers and you have to be sure that every cracker gets covered. Okay, just like this. This is one of those recipes with so completely simple that you almost feel like, well, what else do I have to do? Well, there’s nothing else to do except spread this out and making sure everything clear to the corners is covered. Just like that. Spread it around. Don’t let that boil long because you know what happens when sugar boils long, it starts to take on like a life of its own, it gets very hard and we don’t want that to happen. So see how I’m pushing this up into the corners all over the entire cookie sheet and just continue just like so, making sure you’ve covered all of it. Now, this is going to go into a preheated 350 degree oven. Get the right tool because I don’t think that’s the one I want. Let’s try it with a metal spoon seems to go better. Sure it does. Okay, now this is gonna go into, like I said, 350 degree oven and it only bakes for 10 minutes or until it gets golden brown. Now what happens in that 10 minutes and you can see it’s even starting to happen now. These crackers will start the float. So when you bring them out of the oven, the first thing you want to be sure that you do is put them all back in order because those lines are where you’re gonna cut your cookies and you need to know where they are. If you get off crooked with that, that doesn’t work so good. So this is going into the oven now that’s preheated, right there for just 10 minutes, set the timer for 10 minutes and we’ll come back to them. When we bring them out of the oven, as soon as you bring them out of the oven, you’re gonna take a bag of chocolate chips and you’re going to just sprinkle them all over the top while it’s still real hot. See then the heat from the cookies or the crackers goes up and melts the chocolate chips. And then you’ll take a knife after about five minutes, and you’ll spread that over the top. And what you get is this little goodie right here. That’s a brutzel bar. And you know, you can cut them or you can break them kind of like, you know how they do the peanut brittle. You can break them in an uneven pieces. Oh, that is so good, so simple. Wouldn’t you enjoy getting a tin of those for a Christmas gift? Absolutely. That’s what I’m trying to do with these cookie recipes to show you gift ideas also. There is such a lack of people that bake today. So the people who are busy when they get something homemade, they feel like they just got the world. And all you’ve done is just taken a little bit of your time mix some of your love with the recipe and made a wonderful gift for them. Okay, so let’s see that was number three. Here we go number four. This one’s called, a little chocolate in there. These are called Creamy wafers. This was a recipe that Paul’s mom always made. She was a very, very good cook and an excellent baker. In here we have one cup, I’m sorry, two cups of flour. And I’m going to mix the butter and put that in there and we’re gonna use whipping cream, okay. First of all, I’m gonna let me blend this in here a little bit. And your butter cannot be soft. Don’t think, oh, I have to let that out. When you’re mixing a flour, the butter into the flour and you want to pastry, the coldness is what makes the pastry light. If you have a warm butter, it’s not gonna work well. It’s just gonna, like when you roll it out, it’s just gonna go. It’s not going to hold up nice and firm. Besides the fact that you’re going to need, you need to always chill this after you’ve done it because you want this dough to be really nice and cold so that when you cut out your little wafers, they just turn out beautifully. If you don’t have one of these handy gadgets, they’re very inexpensive, it’s worth it. It’s great for pie crust, any kind of a dough that’s a pastry type dough. And we’re just really cutting the flour or the butter into the flour might take a little bit of time, that’s okay. Just like so. Now what you’re looking for is, you know, like the little morsels of oatmeal, how the depths about that size is what you’re looking for, the butter pieces to be when you’re done, mixing them and blending them. So this might take you a little bit of time, then all you’re gonna do after that’s done is put your whipping cream in it. After you have your whipping cream in, you’ll form a nice dough. Your gonna divide that dough into three parts and you’re gonna put them in the refrigerator, three parts about like this for about two hours to chill, because you want that butter to get good and cold. Now, to roll them out, you need a biscuit cutter or some kind of a cutter. I like the dainty ones, maybe we can take a look at them here. Let me just show you what they look like. These are what we call creamy wafers. And they are a sandwich type cookie. They have the red and green sugar on the top and they have a wonderful filling inside. And these are the size that you want them. I particularly liked the little ones so I use this little plastic cup, just dip it in flour, roll the dough out on a flour base and then just start cutting them. And it’s amazing, they pop right out and you put them on your cookie sheet and you let them bake at 375 degrees. Now, let me tell you that when you have a pastry, you always started higher because you need the heat to crisp that up. Like if you do like pumpkin pie, you start at 425 then you reduce them down to 350 to bake the filling, but to keep it, crisp you don’t want long, low heat. You want high, that heat that gets in there and crisps up that pastry and makes it hold its form so it doesn’t get limp and chewy. So that’s what you’re gonna with our creamy wafers. You’ll bring them out after you’ve baked them for just, oh let’s see, seven to nine minutes. See these all bake very quickly. Let them cool completely. And before you put them in, you can sprinkle them with red or green or leave them plain. But you wanna prick them with a fork to make sure they don’t puff all out of shape, okay. Bake them, bring them out and then we give you the creamy filling recipe also. These are wonderful cookies and when we come back I have some more information about all the cookies we’ve done today and even more stay tuned we’ll be right back. Well, I’ve just taken the brutzel bars out of the oven and I’ve just sprinkled them with our chocolate morsels. You can see already, they’re starting to melt and we’re going to let that sit just for a minute, but I want you to come over here ’cause I want to show you, you ask me all the time, how do you package your cookies for freezing? First of all, you want to get containers that have tight fitting lids, absolutely necessary, can’t do without that. Next you need wax paper and you need like a stretch tite, this is a plastic wrap, okay. Now say we’re going to, we have a big batch of cookies. You want to try to figure out the size and if it will accommodate however many cookies you have. You begin to layer them in. Now if this is a cookie that has an icing on it, you would do a single layer and after the first layer was in totally and completely, then you would take one piece and you’d try to judge it the size of the container, rip it off and fold the one end in, put that down so that the icing doesn’t stick to the bottom of the next one and then you put the next layer. When you get to top, hopefully this is filled to the top, the last thing you’re gonna do is take a piece of this kind of stuff, put it over the entire container, just like that, okay. Then you’ll put the lid on, just like this. And you have to make sure that the lid fits tightly because that’s gonna be your seal when that pops, you know, no air can get in there and so no freezer burn can happen to these cookies. Now what I like to do, and you can see by one of these containers, I like to put what it is on the end, because then when you come looking for cookies, where’s those cherry cheesecakes or where’s those chocolate chewy’s, you know where they are. So I just put cherry cheesecakes, total four dozen. And that helps when it comes time to find them. You know, the important thing is to keep the container the same size that will accommodate all of the cookies, right to the top. Well we hope you’ve enjoyed it. Next week, part two, we’re gonna do all kinds of goodies next week. Some surprises also, we’re so glad you joined us. Be sure to join us the next time, because it wouldn’t be the same without you.
- [Announcer 1] Food provided by McGinnis Sisters special food stores in Brentwood and Monroeville, tastes the world.
- [Announcer 2] Cornerstone TeleVision wishes to thank all our faithful viewers who’s consistent prayers and financial support have made this program possible.
So happy to see Arlene! Her legacy lives on. She was such a blessing to so many people.