Christmas baking and cozy holiday books

Thinking beyond the sugar cookie, plus letting literature inspire you in the kitchen

Hello friend,

I love baking, and never feel a stronger pull toward the mixing bowls and measuring cups than I do during the holiday season. And yet, for years, Christmas cookie-baking felt to me like more of an obligation than a source of joy, typically a perfunctory, eleventh-hour slice-and-bake session just in time to decorate for Santa.

Finally it dawned on me: the reason baking had continued to get pushed to the very margins of my holiday capacity is that I don’t particularly like Christmas cookies, so I’ve never felt very excited about making them. Sugar cookies are too, well, sugar-forward for my taste. Pinwheels and windowpanes are pretty, but their flavor leaves me pretty cold. Meltaways, snowballs, and any cookie with a jam filling…well, I think they’re actually kind of gross (is it just me?)

At any holiday spread I’d usually find myself cherry-picking the most pedestrian—and to me, only-nominally “Christmas”—cookies of the bunch; the no-bakes and red-and-green M&M cookies and peanut-butter blossoms, while guiltily passing over the much more labor-intensive creations made from recipes lovingly passed down through generations.

But why didn’t I see those as “real” Christmas cookies, worthy of holiday-era baking sessions? I don’t know why this took so long to occur to me, but sugar cookies are not required at Christmas. “Christmas cookies” can be any kind of cookie. They can even be something that is not quite a cookie at all, like fudge or brownies or a really yummy quick bread.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling too overwhelmed to start, it’s because there are too many potential options. Having fewer options to choose from can be energizing, and I’ve found that working within limits actually inspires a lot of creativity. So what would happen, I wondered, if I just chose one or two types of baked goods I actually enjoy eating during the holiday, and doubled-down on those?

It only took me a few seconds to choose my categories: shortbread and quick breads.

Shortbread, because I prefer a buttery, almost-savory goodie to a super-sugary treat. And quickbread, because they can be customized with so many holiday flavors and they’re more than just a dessert.

I’d picked up a few bags of fresh cranberries for 99 cents each in an after-Thanksgiving sale, and those were my muse for my first holiday baking stint. I made these three recipes:

• Cranberry-Orange Loaf - So. So. So delicious. I’ve now made four loaves and they barely last a few hours. Great warm, cold, room temperature; with butter or without…so so good. It’s a very simple recipe and it comes together quickly - if you’re looking for an easy crowd-pleaser or something you can bake in bulk for gifts: stop here, make this.

• Cranberry-Orange Shortbread Cookies - Another “wow.” These cookies are addictive: dense, buttery, sweet-tart with a hint of orange. The perfect accompaniment to an afternoon cup of tea! I used a stand mixer rather than a food processor for this recipe which worked very well (I only have one small food processor, and it was busy chopping the cranberries which are pretty much impossible to cut up by hand as they mostly just roll away.) A word of warning: I over-mixed one of my batches, and while the flavor was still very good, the texture was fluffier and more similar to a sugar cookie and less the dense shortbread experience I was going for. So really take a minimal approach with mixing on this one.

• Sourdough Discard Cranberry-Orange Bread - Also very good, and a great way to use up extra sourdough discard. I altered the recipe a little because it only called for a very small amount of orange juice, and I thought I wanted a more orange-forward flavor. But between the sourdough discard and the OJ, the flavor wound up a little too tart for my tastes. I might make this one again but following the recipe exactly; the cranberries are already so tart that they seem to do best with a milder/sweeter bread for contrast.

Last night Eric and I had friends over and I made Indian food: this slow-cooker chevon (goat) curry and red lentil curry; so I decided to try my hand at making Nankhatai, or Indian shortbread cookies, in keeping with the dinner’s theme and my personal shortbread mission. Unfortunately, this recipe didn’t work quite as easily. I could not get the dough to come together no matter how hard I tried: it stubbornly remained a dry pile of smooshy, floury crumbs. I tried adding a little more rosewater, and then a little more butter, to help the dough form, which finally worked—but then the final cookie was much more crispy, and not the the dense, thick shortbread I favor. Still very passable, though, and the cardamom-rosewater flavor was unexpectedly tasty. It’s possible that this recipe is simply meant to have a lighter texture than the more Western-style shortbread I’m used to, so I’m still going to consider it an overall success, if not an out-of-the-park home run.

I’ve spent many happy hours in the kitchen over the last couple of weeks, and now that my boys’ arrival, and the kickoff of holiday celebrations in our quickly-emptying nest are right around the corner, I’m planning to step it up. And while a batch of peanut-butter blossoms may make their way into the mix, I’m letting go of the expectation that red and green icing, sprinkles, or decorative sugars need to be part of my holiday baking experience.

As the matriarch of the family, it is my privilege and prerogative to decide the kind of baked goods that will become traditional in our family. And if one day, my great-grandchildren are passing out platters of my “famous” shortbread and nothing else, that’ll be just fine by me.

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A few more recipes that are on my holiday to-bake list:

• An earl grey shortbread, because of course I must try a tea-based recipe;

• Because I still have a bag and a half of cranberries that need to be used, this apple cider-cranberry quickbread;

• And, barmbrack, or Irish tea bread - inspired by my most recent episode of The Tea’s Made podcast.

In this episode I chatted with

CJ | A Well-Read Tart

, who runs a book and food blog where CJ shares book reviews and food inspiration including literature-inspired recipes and more. In our conversation we each shared some of our favorite food-related memories from literature (it’s the Christmas dinner scene from Farmer Boy for me), and discussed cozy holiday fiction (CJ’s enthusiasm helped spark my recent unapologetic embrace of the entire cozy genre).

CJ also shared her process for letting books guide and inspire her kitchen adventures. Listen to the episode for that conversation - it’s a fun one, and a perfect cozy chat to accompany your gift-wrapping or holiday baking session. And you’ll find a complete list of the books discussed at the episode’s show notes!

Speaking of books…

I’m basically surrounded by books right now, including a haul of holiday Hallmark-movie style romances and cozy mysteries I picked up at the library earlier this week, inspired by my conversation with

CJ | A Well-Read Tart

. In addition to those, here are a couple of books that have always been within reaching-and-reading distance over the past couple of weeks:

• Winter Fire by G.K. Chesterton (currently backordered at Bookshop.org). I got the Kindle version of this book last year, and decided it was worth investing in the hard copy this year. It’s a beautifully-illustrated compilation of writings about Christmas by G.K. Chesterton (if you aren’t familiar, he’s like the literary version of C.S. Lewis’s older and slightly more curmudgeonly uncle), with commentary by Ryan Smith. Short, daily reads to get you in the Christmas spirit!

• The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year by Margaret Renkl - while maintaining a weekly book club post for an entire year while under deadline for my own book proved to be more ambitious than I was able to pull off (shocker!) I’ve kept The Comfort of Crows near my writing/reading spot all year long and still turn to its weekly entries as inspiration for my own thoughts and writing.

  
  The book’s “backyard year” is coming to a close, and I’ll be sad to wrap it up - but now, Renkl has come out with Leaf, Cloud, Crow: A Weekly Backyard Journal, which I will be excited to start on the first official week of winter! The two books together would make an excellent Christmas gift, and both The Comfort of Crows and Leaf, Cloud, Crow are available on Bookshop.org.

As you pause at this, the halfway mark of the month, I hope you are able to feel content with wherever you are in your preparation for holiday celebrations. As a young mother, I spent the back half of so many Decembers in a sort of counterproductive productivity panic, feeling constantly behind and wondering if I was teaching enough, magic-making enough, celebrating enough…which is, of course, another way of wondering if I was enough.

I’m able to see, now, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was really the smallest little gestures of continuity and cheer that have made the biggest impact on my now-adult kids, who, to a one, all love Christmas: not because of some grand master plan I was able to pull off every year, but simply because we are all, cozily, together.

That aim is what now guides my preparations for the time I’ll soon be spending with them, and the rest - the goodies and the breads and the music and all the rest - are simply the icing on an already very-delicious holiday story. Good tidings and joy to you as you ease into your own observance of that story, friends.

-Meagan