Cream Cheese Cutout Cookies

This is a delicious slightly tangy cookie.  It is not too sweet and stands up to decorating well.  Make sure the dough is still chilled before you put them in the oven or they tend to spread and make you shapes look a little mutated. Great with Royal Icing!

Ginger Lemon Cremes

This is one of my favorite cookies.  They are the perfect combination of spicy, sweet, and tart.  They can be made without the ammonium bicarbonate, which can be bought from specialty cooking stores, or the internet, but they will not be as snappy and you need to roll them quite thin.  You can also substitute baking powder if you handle it well.

A note about ammonium bicarbonate:  It smells awful… terrible! Like ammonia, because it is… but it dissipates once it is baked and makes a wonderful crispy cookie.  This means you should not taste your dough before it is cooked, even though it is totally food safe, it just doesn’t taste very good.  Also, you have to make sure it is tightly covered when stored or it will literally just evaporate into the air.

Meringue Cookies

The are great for holidays and are perfectly suited for Passover, which comes up in mid-April because it is mostly egg whites and sugar and love.  You can always add in extras.  The ones above have crushed peppermint sticks sprinkled over before baking, but you can add chocolate chips, cocoa, flavorings... anything you fancy, just add them in after all the sugar has been added.

One word of advice though, since you are not using cream of tartar which stabilizes egg whites (because it is made of grape skins a.k.a yeast central) make these on a day with low humidity (rainy days and meringues don't mix) and make sure your mixing bowl is absolutely free of all grease, or the egg whites won't inflate.

Easiest Peanut Butter Cookies

My sister wrote me an email asking for a peanut butter cookie recipe.  She doesn’t like cooking like I do, and so I gave her this recipe and she replied that I knew her well.  With just 4 ingredients, it cannot get much easier. If you like, you can use just one kind of sugar, bringing it down to just 3 ingredients, but I like the variety of the two sugars. This can also be done by hand, if you do not have an electric mixer, or don't feel like cleaning it. It can also be halved easily for a smaller batch.