Happy Saint Nicholas day to all!

I wanted to make cookies. I had found and kept available the Santa Hat cookie cutter. I had a plan to find red paste food dye and/or use beet juice for a deep red. I would make Santa hat cookies and carefully write all the family names on one for each. Well, this did not happen.

First of all I needed a recipe. I did not want to have to stand and cut out a million cookies  so wanted a recipe that made 2-3 dozen.  We were running low on eggs so did not want a recipe that required more than 1 egg (we had three in the fridge) so I thought a shortbread would work nicely. So my new Essential Pepin cookbook has an almond shortbread and I had all the ingredients. But then I thought that my daughter is allergic to almonds and she would not be able to eat any of these.

I did not take into consideration that this would most likely be a virtual-physically-distanced-for-social-solidarity-type Christmas anyway. So the search for the recipe continued. I thought Dark o’ Moon cookies but they require two eggs. That would mean no breakfast of eggs with the leftover roasted root veg this week. I paged through my mother’s recipe notebook’s cookie section. These are clippings that she collected and tried over the years. I found Cinnamon Crisps which were a cut out cookie and required no eggs. Bingo!

Flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, butter, and milk. Pet milk is a brand of evaporated milk, or my mother would have used Milnot. The recipe was put together similarly to a cake recipe. It made a soft dough. Too soft to roll out but I gave it the old college try anyway, adding flour to the rolling process. Finally I gave up and rolled it out on the parchment paper, put that on the cookie sheets, and baked.

Here are the results:

I had to cut the one blob of cookie apart for the final few minutes of baking and if you look closely you can see the Santa hat shape I was going for. They are actually tasty. I should have made the decision to make them drop cookies when I saw that the dough was too soft to roll.  And then squashed them slightly with the bottom of a glass dipped in cinnamon sugar.  Ooh, that sounds good. But too late for that now.

I will wait until the grocery shopping Hubby fills up my baking pantry with eggs and brown sugar and more butter. That way I can choose from more recipes than I did when I chose Cinnamon Crisps. Meanwhile, these are tasty, although unsightly, nibbles.