There is nothing more comforting than a simple, perfect cookie. And it almost doesn’t matter what it goes with. You can pour yourself a glass of milk, brew a pot of tea, rev up the espresso machine, or pull out a bottle of cognac. Add a cookie, and almost instantly you’re deep into a gratifying, fulfilling, happy moment. As celebrity TV host Ina Garten likes to say, “You can be miserable before you have a cookie, and you can be miserable after you eat a cookie, but you can’t be miserable while you are eating a cookie.”
The cookies we love to bake are not the kind you’d find in a French patisserie or an Italian panetteria. We leave those to the pros. We prefer the good old cookie-jar kind, ones you can make with next-gen bakers. Picture these on the counter cooling and everyone who walks by wants to swipe one right off the wire rack (we all know or live with a Cookie Monster). Shoo! They’re our holiday gifts.
In the lineup this year are Peanut Butter Cookies with a dark-chocolate peanut butter cup pressed into the tops of each round before baking. Cultured Butter Shortbread that tastes completely different — richer and more complex — than the usual kind made with sweet cream butter. Squares of Brown Butter Blondies with an intense butterscotch flavor. Brownie Cookies that are everything you’d expect, in round cookie form this time, dusted with flaky sea salt. And jagged-edged Almond Currant Thins with a shiny, golden sheen.
Tuck your little confections into a cellophane bag and tie it with a ribbon or use any box you had the good sense to put away earlier in the year especially for this occasion. I like thin wood 1-pint boxes that berries come in at the height of the season; I hoard them a little.
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I line them with parchment paper and use them even if they’re stained with strawberry juices. Like everything else, they’re online now and I could have been packing cookies into clean, new boxes shipped from somewhere far, far away. But what fun is that?
Sheryl Julian can be reached at [email protected].