Santa Claus Cookies (and Rebbe too)

Making Santa Claus cookies is a family tradition spanning three generations. Grandma (my dad's mom) is the originator. I don't know how she got started making the large, intricate cookies, but she made them every single year along with dozens of other types of cookies. My siblings and cousins all learned how to make them in Grandma's kitchen and most of us still keep the tradition alive, though they are a  lot of work. This year the entire process took me three days. 

In order to make Santa Claus cookies, you first need to have a Santa Claus cookie cutter. Without Aunt Chick's Jolly Santa Cookie cutter, you can't make these cookies. No substitution will work.  Grandma's Santa was probably from the 1950s. My oldest cousin, who is a trained chef and baker, inherited that one. I got mine in the early 2000s. Fortunately, you still can get one today.

I got my Santa as a kit with three other cookie cutters - a star, a tree, and a stocking - and a recipe booklet. I don't uses the recipe in the booklet. I use Grandma's recipe. I'm not sure if Grandma started out using the one as written and modified it so it worked for her or if she just used one of her own from the beginning. It doesn't really matter. It works and it's hers so I use it. I'm also willing to share it:

1 1/2 cups soft butter, 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp. vanilla, 2 eggs, 4 cups flour, 400, 10-12 min. 

Okay, so that's a very minimalist recipe. I've got a bunch like this in my cooking binder. I know how to make the cookies, so I don't need more details. I will, however, provide those details in case anyone would like to give these a try. 

So first, cream the butter and sugar. I use a stand mixer. Then add the vanilla and eggs. Once that's all beaten together, slowly add the flour. I then take the dough out of the mixer, split it into two lumps, wrap them in plastic wrap, and refrigerate them overnight. That's day 1 of the process.

Day 2, I remove one of the lumps of dough from the fridge to work with. With the kitchen scale I bought for myself several years ago, I weigh out 55 grams of dough for each cookie. This is not at all necessary, I just love weighing stuff on that little scale. Now the exercise in patience begins. Work the dough between your hands until it starts to warm up and soften slightly. You really just have to get the feel for it to know when it's right. Then press it into the lightly-floured cookie cutter with your thumbs.

Very slowly and carefully peel up part of the edge of the dough and try to get it to release from the mold.

Feel free to swear a this point but don't loose faith! The first one is always a mess, just like with pancakes. Just wipe down the cutter, re-flour it, and try again. Remember to keep breathing. Take your time. Calm your senses and the universe will reward you, eventually.

Repeat this process, redoing and swearing as needed, until you've filled a cookie sheet with six Santas. Then bake in a preheated oven at 400 degree Fahrenheit for 10 to 12 minutes. I let mine bake a tad too long so they were slightly brown on the edges. It's fine. Let them sit on the cookie sheet for three minutes after you remove them from the oven then transfer to a rack to cool completely.

Now, Santa Claus cookies are very clearly for Christmas. But what if you celebrate other winter holidays or no holidays at all? Well, my grandmother would send her sister's family "Old Man" cookies as they are Jehovah's Witnesses. My husband had the brilliant idea several years ago to transform Santa into a Rebbe for Hanukkah. To do this, we only filled the cookie cutter with dough up to the hat brim. Then we added an addition rectangle of dough to the top for a shtreimel. The resulting cookies weigh in at 70 grams - 50g face and beard, 20g shtreimel (in case anyone is keeping track).

The dough turned out slightly softer this year, so the cookies flattened out a bit in the oven, but overall, I was pleased. After about an hour an a half, I had 19 cookies cooling on the racks. Now, if I had had time, I could have decorated them right away. As I didn't, I wrapped them up and put them in the freezer. These cookies freeze amazingly well both undecorated and decorated.

Day three of the process came three days later. I pulled the cookies from the freezer then got things prepared for decorating. Part of what makes these cookies so special is that each one is hand decorated. What you will need for this is red and blue food coloring, shredded coconut (I whiz it in a food processor to make it into smaller shreds otherwise the beards and eyebrows look particularly wild and unkempt), and white icing. I always make my seven-minute icing, as Grandma taught me. I suppose you could cheat and use store-bought icing, but I wouldn't. 

Before I get going with the icing, I paint the Santas (and Rebbes). Santa gets red food coloring very slightly diluted with water painted on his hat with a small paintbrush and they all get a dot of red for their mouths. Then, I dilute the red with a lot more water and add a light blush to their winter-kissed cheeks and noses. I used a toothpick and undiluted blue food coloring to paint in eyes.

Then, it's time for the icing. Here's Grandma's recipe:
 

2 egg whites, 1 cup sugar, 1/8 tsp. cream of tartar, 1/4 cup water, 1 tsp vanilla

Again, minimalist, and this one definitely needs some instructions. Mix all the ingredients together in the top of a double boiler. For me, that means the Pyrex bowl that fits very well on top of my Revereware pot, which I fill 2/3 of the way with water. Let the water come up to nearly a boil then turn down the burner and put the bowl of icing ingredients on top of the pot.

Mix constantly at low speed with a hand mixer for seven minutes, making sure that you get around the edges and that you don't let the water in the pot below boil over.

Remove from the heat but leave the frosting bowl over the pot to keep it warm. If you have a pastry bag, put about 1/3 of the frosting into it. I don't have a pastry bag, so I use whatever type of plastic bag I have at the time and snip off the corner. 

I trace over the eyebrows and mustache and under the mouth with the piped frosting and fill in the hat band and pompom.

I do just a few at a time so the frosting doesn't set up before I'm done. Then I carefully lift Santa, hold him by the sides of his face, and slather his beard with frosting using a butter knife.

I then cover the entire top of the cookies with coconut. I press it down gently into the frosting before flipping the old man upside down and tapping the back of his head with a spoon to get rid of the extra coconut. And there we have it!

I've tried various things for the Rebbe's shtreimel over the years. First I tried dying coconut with black food coloring (read I had my husband try it). That was a mess. The next year, I tried crushing up chocolate cookies. That worked okay but was a bit chunky. This year, I tried sending the chocolate animal cookies through Grandma's meat grinder, thinking it would make nice consistent chunks. Well it did, but the chunks were dust-sized. So, I mixed the cookie dust with the shredded coconut. It turned out okay, but I think I'll try something new next year. I just don't know what yet. 

I left the cookies on the board in the oven overnight to dry then packaged them up. 

Whew! They do take a lot of effort but I love making them every year. And friends and family seem to enjoy getting them. I've been told they are too pretty to eat and I reply that I put so much work in them, you'd better eat them! I recommend eating them from the hat down.

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah!

The Night Before Christmas

Every year we would go to Grandma's for Christmas Eve.  There was no river to cross but our trip did take us past the family sawmill and up the hill through the woods to Grandma's house.  I was told it was tradition for Santa to decorate the Christmas tree as well as bringing presents.  That was not the tradition at home, only at Grandma's, but I never really saw a problem with that.  When we arrived, the door to the living room would be closed tight in waiting for Santa to come and deck it out.  As the adults finished up getting dinner onto the table, my sister and I would lay flat on the floor trying to see through the thin crack under the door.

I never remember there being a specific main course we would have every Christmas eve dinner.  There was turkey or maybe chicken and probably a ham a year or two.  There was sometimes fish, though I never really got the hang of fish until I was older.  There might have even been a lasagna one year if it struck Grandma's fancy.  In later years, when we had all aged out of Santa we even had picnics with potato salad and hotdog cooked in the fireplace.  But when we were little the dinner did not really matter.  The food was always good but that part of the night was for the adults. 

Grandpa would sit at the head of the table and my dad would sit at the foot and the rest of us would pack in around the sides.  Sometimes it was just the seven of us – my grandparents, parents, sister, brother and me.  Other times my aunt and uncle and two cousins were there too.  We kids would eat quickly and wait impatiently as the grownups chatted and laughed and seemed to ignore the torture of our wait.

Eventually, the adults must have taken as much fidgeting and whining as they could stand.  Grandma would start clearing the table and my siblings and cousins and I would take off like a stampeding herd, racing hand and foot up the ugly green-carpeted stairs to my grandparents' bedroom.  We would clamor for a good spot on Grandma's hope chest with its faux leopard skin drape that sat under the large window.  There we would fall silent, pressing our ears and foreheads against the glass to wait for the first sound and perhaps even a sight of Santa or his team.  We clung to each other in giddiness, giggling in quiet, breathless gasps of anticipation.  I remember my oldest cousin, far too old to actually believe anymore, encouraging us to stay quiet and listen hard.  Santa was on his way.

And then we would hear it, faint at first and then rising to a glorious crescendo.  Sleigh bells!  He was coming!  He was here!  Santa had come and right at that very moment he was leaving presents for us all just downstairs.  It must have been an eternity for us to wait until we heard the bells again this time fading into the night, signaling the end to Santa's work there.

One of the adults probably called us back downstairs at that point but the sound of our excitement and trampling feet on the stairs would drown out even the loudest shouts.  At the bottom of the stairs the door to the living room stood open waiting for us.  Inside the room was aglow with warm light and all the beauty of the holiday.  The sheer awe of it was almost indescribably.  Grandma's plain old living room had been transformed.  The tree glistened with white lights, glass icicles, glittered wooden animals and birdhouses, strings of tinsel, and little silver foil cups each with Hershey's kiss inside.  Fresh green boughs covered the mantle glittering with more lights and dotted with red poinsettias.  On the table in the corner, two green ceramic trees with multicolored lights stood guard on either side of the hand carved wooden nativity that glowed from its own light within.  Best of all were the piles of presents, freshly delivered, spread around the base of the tree, sometimes stretching all the way to the arm chair near the television.  It was a truly amazing and delightful sight to behold.  And to think, Santa had done it all in mere moments as we waited breathlessly in the room above.

Of course, the truth was that Grandma had spent the day, maybe even more, putting up the tree and decorating before starting on dinner for that night.  She would bake several dozen kinds of cookies in the days leading up to Christmas too.  She must have been a very busy lady.  And all her work was not finished when she shut the door on the decorated living room and served up a wonderful meal.  Some time along the way I learned that after we had gone upstairs after dinner Grandma would sneak through a small door from the cellar way into the living room and would plug in the lights that encircled the tree and ran across the mantle.  Then she would descend into the basement, climb outside through the Bilco doors and run around the house ringing sleigh bells.  She would then sneak back in and be quietly waiting with the other adults as we thundered down the stairs to see what Santa had brought.  I don't know how she did it some winters with the ice and snow built up on the doors but she did – every year, until somehow we had stopped believing in Santa, of course. 

Several years ago when we had gathered at Grandma's for Christmas Eve dinner again, Grandma decided to revive the old tradition.  As we sat around the table over desserts, yes plural, and coffee and tea, lingering far longer than anyone in the under-ten set could have stood, she sneaked outside and ran around the house with her bells.  She made sure to knock on the window behind my father just to make sure we knew that it was her instead of Santa.  It always was her and it's almost better that way, believing in a real person and not an elfish saint.  Yet, to this day I'm still convince that one Christmas Eve I caught a glimpse of a reindeer hoof briefly dipping below the edge of the roof.  It was magic.  

Merry Christmas!