Arlene Makes Orange Cookies, Almond Cookies, Sugar Cookies, and More in this 1993 Episode!

Well, hello, and welcome to AT Home today. This is program number two of our series for the holidays for Christmas. And for New Year’s Day dinner. Today we’re going to do some more cookies. I hope you sent last week and got the booklet because it is just packed full of all the recipes. And one of the features about it is that you only have to write once this month to get the whole month’s worth of recipes. You don’t have to write week after week after week. If you wrote last week, you have all the recipes that we’re going to be presenting from now throughout the New Year’s Day. So I’m so excited about this because we tried to make it easy for you. And we’re going to be telling you at the end of the program, how you can get your special copy of At Home Christmas recipes 1993. You know, this time of the year is a time for reflection, time to look back, to look ahead and to look at the present. And it’s also a time, it’s most important for us to realize what it is that we’re celebrating. It’s not a Christmas tree. It’s not a Santa Claus. It’s not all of the things that the world is telling us is so important about this holiday. The important thing is that we remember Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world was born. And we’re celebrating his birth. You say but Arlene it’s not on December 25th. I understand that. That’s not important. The important thing is that we indeed are celebrating the birthday of Jesus Christ, our Savior and our King. At this time of the year particularly, what I like to do is go to my Bible, because this kind of sets my heart in the right position to receive what God wants to give to me during this holiday season. And I always read the second chapter of Luke because that tells the Christmas story. It’s Luke the second chapter and it goes for quite a few verses. I would suggest that sometime during this week, you get your Bible, wherever it might be, I hope it’s right next to your bed there on the table. But wherever it is, pick that Bible down your children, gather them around you and read the story of how Jesus Christ was born in Bethlehem. It’s so exciting. When you talk about the angels and you talk about the wise man. You talk about the important things and why we’re celebrating the season. Please do that this week, would you? I know that it will set your heart and set your spirit to celebrate the season in the proper way. Well, we’re going to get busy now because we’re going to do our second program on cookies. And I hope that you’ve got your paper and pencil ready. And you’re ready to go with me because we’re going to be rushing through them. We got lots of things to do. We’ll be back right after this important message to get started. Stay with us.

Here’s today’s At Home hint. Does your fork stick to your homemade peanut butter cookie dough? Well dip the fork tines in cinnamon or ginger first, then press down effective and tasty two. If you’ve got a helpful hint that you’d like to share with us, we want to hear from you. Send your hand to At Home hints, CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148-1499.

Now the first cookie that we’re going to start with today is called lace cookies. These are very easy, and they’re very light and airy and they have oatmeal in them. And the first thing we’re going to do is take a half a cup of butter and melt it. Now no substitutions you have to use butter because that’s the basic flavor and that’s what flavors the whole cookie. So we’ve melted our half a cup of butter. We’re going to add a third of a cup of sifted flour and one cup of the quick kind of cooking oats, the oatmeal. This is the quick cook. There’s one cup of that. Half a cup of sugar. Okay, and the salt has been added and we added a fourth of a teaspoon of salt, and two tablespoons of milk. And all you do is put it in the pan, put that all together. And you’re just going to stir. That is so simple. You stir it up until it becomes a batter. The melted butter, the milk, the flour, the oats is very simple. And you’ll see that starts to stick together. You don’t take keep cooking it, you take it from the, off the heat because you don’t need to do that. Now all you do is take a spoon and you place them a couple of inches apart. Now you think, oh, I can put a bunch of these. I’m telling you these spread out and they go crazy. So you want to give them about two or three. This has to be greased and flour, your baking sheet, okay. And you’re going to put them out on the cookie sheet. And you’re not going to stop with that. But then you take a spatula and you flatten them. You spread them out. Now what happens is that the sugar in there makes it all stick together. This is one of the prettiest cookies, so light and just beautiful. You’ll see when they come out they are large. This will make a cookie about this large, doesn’t seem like it would but it does, really important to flatten it out as thin as you possibly can. Okay, let’s do a few more here. This is one of the easiest of all recipes, and one of the tastiest in prettiest cookies. You could put a whole box full of these together for the mailman, or for the neighbor that lives next door, whomever that you really want to say something special to but you just don’t have a lot of money. Or maybe it’s a person who they themselves never get a good homemade cookie or something special like that and you’d like to do that. See, that’s what I like to do about Christmas. Like to make things from my heart filled with love, filled with caring and give them as gifts because you’re giving a little bit of yourself when you do that. Next week’s program, we’re going to be making all kinds of gifts from the kitchen, so you want to be sure to join us then. But cookies are always a welcome gift particularly for about that shut-in neighbor who lost his wife a couple of years ago and he lives all alone. How about inviting him even for Christmas dinner, or make him up a nice box of cookies. He would love that, because it’s from your heart. Now these will now go into a 325 degree oven, and they’re going to bake for five to seven minutes until the edges get brown. So we’re going to go ahead and do that. Put them in the oven five to seven minutes. The edges have to be brown. We’re going to give them six. When it says five to seven, I start with six and I can add a minute or whatever. All right. Those are lace cookies, that makes about three to three and a half dozen depending on the size you make them. If you want to make them smaller, of course you can do that. Now the next cookie, you’re going to have to run to keep up with us today because we’re really rushing along so we can cram a lot of recipes for you. This is an orange cookie. There’s nothing that smells any better than fresh orange or fresh lemon. I’ve not made this with lemon but I have a feeling you can make a lemon cookie with the very same recipe only using the fresh lemon rind and lemon juice. What we’ve done here, we’ve taken half a cup of shortening and a cup of sugar. And we have cream this very well. Now we’re going to add our eggs, which is two eggs. Isn’t this a great time of the year? Christmas music going, people shopping, the bustle of the season, and I just hope that you keep in your heart the real reason for what we’re celebrating it. It makes everything just work better if you’ll do that. You’ll realize it’s not important if you get everything done or not. It’s important to if you’ve stopped to remember really what the celebration is all about. Now we’re going to add the eggs and this is a half a cup of fresh squeezed orange juice. Okay and a tablespoon of fresh grated orange rind. This is so fragrant and so good. You will thoroughly enjoy. Get the kids to help out with this. They can juice those oranges. Now we’re going to blend this well. Remember now that was shortening. That was a half a cup of shorting with one cup of sugar. And we’re blending. Now you would want to blend this a little longer if you’re making this and we had more time. I’d let this go a little longer, but because for the sake of time, we’re going to add now this is our flour and it’s two and a half cups of flour, two and one half cups of flour and we’re going to add some, let’s see, this is baking soda, half a teaspoon of baking soda. Put that in there. And let me see what else we have to do. I think that’s it. We’re going to add coconut to this also. So first we’re going to blend this. You don’t have to do that with the beaters unless you want to. I tend to like to do this with a spatula. If you’re in a hurry, use the beater. Maybe I will today because I am in a hurry. I kind of like to not make it too hard though because sometimes it toughens the dough, but today because we’re in a hurry, and we’re trying to show you a lot of good ideas. I hope you’ll try these ideas. You know this, we’re not doing this just so you have something to watch. We’re doing this to try to motivate you to bake something that you’ve never tried before. Do something new and different, something that your family will say wow, I never tasted that before. That tastes great. That’s, when I hear that from my family then I think all my work was very well worth it. Okay, here’s your, your dough ready. See how easy that is. Okay, I’m going to clean those beaters out and we’re going to stir our coconut in. Excuse the noise there, but we want to get rid of these. And we’re going to stir the coconut, half a cup of coconut. You could use walnuts if you wanted to. And now we just stir that around. These you’re going to drop on a grease cookie sheet. No flour on these just a grease cookie sheet. Okay, this is such a fragrant cookie. And oh, my husband loves these. His mom used to make these all the time with the fresh orange juice and a fresh orange rind. And we, he learned the like them then and I learned to like them, we were going together. You want to do a rounded teaspoon. And it’s nice to make them all the same size when you’re dropping cookies because if you don’t, you make some big and some little, the little ones will burn and the big ones will be raw because you can’t keep them in all at the same time. So try a rounded teaspoon. Let it drop and shape it if you need to. And you do a whole pan like this. And they bake — let me check here — 10 to 12 minutes in a 400 degree oven. That’s much hotter, see now that one’s a little bit large. That would not cook this thoroughly. Because look at the one right next to it. It’s so small. Oh, I’ll add a little bit to him try to make them all the same. Okay, you can almost not ruin this cookie. I mean, this is one of those that you just and it a taste so good. So after these would bake for 10 or 12 minutes, you bring them out, you let them cool on a rack. And they’re done when they’re brown around the edges. You don’t look for this cookie to get real brown because it won’t, but they’ll brown around the edges. And when they’re completely cool, then you’re going to make a butter cream, an orange butter cream icing. That’s what I have here. You combine butter, powdered sugar and orange juice. And that picks up the flavor. You can add some some grated orange rind to that too if you want to. And you just ice them nice and smooth. That is such a nice cookie. You know who likes cookies like that? Usually like your great aunt, or grandma, or Dale, the floor director or anybody else who’s standing behind the cameras waving at me right now. Anyway, everybody. Oh, hi gang. Everybody likes that kind of a cookie because it’s a light cookie. The batter is very light, a very fragrant with an orange flavor. So don’t forget those bake for 10 to 12 minutes on a fast oven or a hot oven 400 degrees. Well, we’re going to show you finished products of all of these things that we’re putting together for you at the end of the program. We just can’t take the time to do it now. I hope you understand that. Next we’re going to be making — this cookie is called an almond butter finger. And it’s a great oops, let’s see what those lace cookies look like. Uh huh. The key to this, I’m going to bring them out. You see them, they’re browned around the edge. You have to let them stay on the tray for about one minute. Because if you don’t, they will break apart when you go to lift them off. You need a wide spatula, and you need to put these on a cooling rack immediately. Okay, so what I’m going to do is get my rack and I’m going to put my rack over here because the kitchen is full today of just everything because I’m trying to show you so much and you think aw these are going to break apart when I take them off but they won’t. You see they’re still just a little bit too hot to take off. I need to wait just a minute. Because if you don’t, aren’t they beautiful? Look how lacy they look? Isn’t that nice? That kind of puts your mind of Victorian, doesn’t it? This in a little box with little cherubs on it, and some pink Christmas ribbon or whatever, what a nice gift for an aunt who thinks that nobody cares about her anymore, or nobody’s concerned. Boy, when she sees that she’ll say, oh, my goodness, somebody loves me. Look at this, what they’ve made for me. And that’s such a gratifying feeling to know that you care enough to do something special for someone who maybe feels like nobody cares. Well, you don’t want to do what I just did there, because that one’s breaking apart, should have waited just a little longer on that, but that’s okay. That’s the one that you give to the kids, you know, let them taste it. It’s important to lift them off when they get brown around the edge, that’s your signal that they’re done. Okay, I will let the rest of them here because I want to get on with the other cookies. But those make about three, three and a half dozen. All right, now we’re going to start our Almond Butterfingers. This is great. These are all quick and easy recipes. Just to give you an idea of variety, something to choose from something new and different to make. This is a very flaky pastry. And what I’ve done here, let me make sure. Three fourths cup of butter, and 1/3 cup of sugar. All right? Now we’re going to add just one teaspoon. This is almond extract, almond extract. And this is one teaspoon. And I’m just going to add that closely measuring every morsel and every little drop. But anyway, we are then going to continue to use the mixer to blend this and cream it. It’s important to keep your butter semi cold. You want it to be a little soft and mushy, but that never makes for a good batter. Doesn’t give a foundation to incorporate the flour or the sugar with so keep your, keep it kind of cold, but not so that you can’t use the mixer. Now we’re going to add the flour. Okay. And what we need to do, we take a half a cup of walnuts that are chopped, and about a tablespoon and a half of plain old sugar and we’re going to combine those, right? Now, just going to gather this up, this will make a very quick and easy dough. These we’re going to roll out. And again, if you don’t like the tedious work of oh, rolling out, this is one of those that you don’t have to worry about that because when you roll these out, they really, really just very quickly come together and you cut them once. You don’t have to keep re rolling and shaping, it’s very important. Make sure that it’s clean under your countertop has to always be very, very clean and dry. If this was wet, and we added some flour, put flour here, you’d have a dough ball, you never get anything rolled out. So it’s very important for you. And you want to make sure that this dough comes together. So after you’ve beat it a little bit more, the warmth of your hand will bring it together. Just keep working with it. You’ll be amazed at how quickly that will come together and always has. So you can see it’s already starting to incorporate into a dough. Sometimes you don’t even need that much flour. And don’t get carried away with the flour when you’re rolling out cookies because remember, every time you add flour, you’re drying up a cookie, and you’re robbing some of the moisture out of it. What happens, this starts out to be a very moist, wonderful cookie. By the time you keep adding the flour, the flour is like hard as a rock. You don’t want to do that. You can see this is coming together just by kneading it with your hand. You’re gathering it into a ball. I’m going to bring it out so I can work it better on the board. And again, the warmth of your hand will bring it into a dough. Just keep working it. You’ll tell it’s getting there because it’ll start to come off your fingers. What I like to do with this is rolled out a third at a time because you’re going to roll not a big round piece. You’re going to roll it into a three inch wide strip. Because these cookies are fingers and they don’t need to be long fingers. They just need to be about the size of your finger. Okay? So we’ll set aside some of the dough. Here’s our flour. We work the dough just a bit. Okay. Now we’re going to roll this out. See I haven’t taken the time to knead this properly and I’m having a little problem with it, but it will be all right. Happens to you at home too, doesn’t it? Sure it does, but you don’t ever get in a panic. You just say, well, let’s try it again and keep going and pretty soon starts to roll out. It sticks to your, your rolling pin, you know you got a little problem. So add a little flour. Now, you want to keep trying to shape this as you’re making it because it should only be about three inches wide, about a fourth of an inch thick. Now, you’re going to even up the edges. This is an old pizza cutter. It works perfect. Make sure they’re about three inches. Scrape this away and even up on all sides. There we go. All right, put some over here, here we go and at the top. And then before you do anything else, you take one egg white that has been beaten until it’s a little frothy, and you, well, got too much there. Okay, put some of your egg white back in if you get too much. If you don’t, just keep spreading it around. Important, I should have beat that again, that wouldn’t have done that. But you just paint it very well all over with the egg white. Then remember at the beginning, I told you to get some of those walnuts and some sugar and mix it together. Well, you mix it around, and then you sprinkle. Now, I think these could be a little fine, but this will work. Because you’re going to make the almond flavor and this is incredible. You say could I use almonds? Sure, if you use the almond flavor in that. Sure, you could use almonds. You can use pecans. You can use any kind of a nut that you want. Then what we do, you can either use your pizza and cut them in fingers, or you can use this. At every half to three fourths of an inch go down. Keep cutting, keep cutting, keep cutting. Then you’ll scrape them up, like so. Take your cookie sheet, and you’re going to separate them when they get to the cookie sheet. All right. Now once you get that done, you see you need a few more walnuts on places. No problem. You got it. You can do that, because these will bake in a preheated 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes. And this is a flaky, flaky dough. It’s wonderful, wonderful, flaky dough. This makes about four to five dozen, depending on how thick and how long you make the fingers. Very easy dough to work with. Don’t be intimidated by it. Just try it. I’m telling you, you’re going to enjoy it. Well I have one more I want to tell you about so I better get on with it. And that is called our crisp sugar cookie. And this is a wonderful cookie because you can either make them very plain and cut them out with just the top of a of a glass or dipped in flour of course, or you can cut them in shapes. The kids can decorate them however you’d like to do it. What I’ve done here is put a cup of butter, soft butter, and I’ve creamed it with two cups of sugar. This recipe makes a lot. I mean, when you talk five cups of flour, this recipe makes a lot. Okay, so we’ve creamed that together. Now we’re going to add our eggs, which is two eggs. Basically, if you’ll notice in a lot of recipes, there are similarities. You cream the butter and the sugar, you add the eggs, you add the flour, you add the vanilla, but it’s what you do after that, that makes it interesting. So we’re going to add our eggs and our vanilla. And we’re going to beat that together. All right, and then we’re going to combine. This is our flour. While that’s going to town there, we’re going to put our flour, baking powder, which is one and a half teaspoons, our teaspoon of baking soda, half a teaspoon of salt. And what I like to do there, if I’m combining those two go in and I like to take a fork and kind of mix it up. Don’t just let it lay on top because all your leavening or the agent in here that will make your cookie raise is all in one spot and you don’t want that to happen. So we’re going to add, we’re going to add the flour. Let me see. Let me get a spoon here. We’re adding the flour to this. This is going to make a heavy dough. We’re running out of time. Let me talk you through it. We’ll add the flour to this alternately with the fourth of a cup of milk. And you’re going to finish up with flour. Then you’re going to put that in the refrigerator and you’ll let it refrigerate for 15 to 30 minutes. Depending on — it’s nice even to let it be longer, but when you bring it out, you’re going to have to work with your dough. This is the kind of a dough that you’re going to have when that is all combined together. Now let me show you when you roll this out, you’re going to roll it out in flour, and again, don’t get carried away with the flour. Just use well however much you need, but try not to overdo it and cover your baking pin and the dough and you start your roll. If it’s hard at first just work with it because when it’s cold — see it’s butter in there. When that butter gets hard then that makes your dough hard. Let it sit out until it gets workable. Roll these out and again, you do them with a cookie cutters, any shapes or sizes that you want. You can make them, like I said, all the top of a jar or a glass, a small glass or large glass, put your colored sugars over them. Put plain sugar over them. Don’t put any sugar over them. It’s a crisp sugar cookie that is just divine and you will enjoy it. I know. We’re going to give you some information on how you can get all of these recipes, the whole month’s worth, right now and we’ll be back to show you the finished products of all that we’ve prepared today. We’ll be right back.

To receive your special Christmas recipe packet 175 containing all of this month’s holiday recipes listen very carefully. Just send a self-addressed business sized double stamped envelope. Yes, that’s two stamps with $1 or more to At Home, 175 CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148-1499. You will only need to write once this month to receive all our Christmas recipes from At Home and have a blessed holiday.

Don’t forget now that’s recipe number 175 needs to be in an envelope sent to At Home, 175 CTV, Wall, Pennsylvania 15148-1499. And in that one needs to be your name and address on an envelope this size please. Two stamps because this booklet is going to be large enough for it to fit in here and it’s going to be two stamps. Plus please include $1 or more 5, 10, whatever you’d like to do to help us keep At Home coming and to defray the costs. Well, we’ve made our cookies. Here they are right here. I hope that you’re enjoying because we’ve added them to the ones we’ve done last week. There are Almond Butterfingers, there’s our orange cookies. Here’s our tray of the crisp sugar cookie. And of course, here’s our beautiful lace cookies. All a fancy array of holiday cookies that are sure to please the palates in your home. Well, be sure to join us next week. We’re going to do gifts from the kitchen. Until then be with us because it just wouldn’t be the same without you.

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