Holiday Baking: Dorie Greenspan's Spice Roll-out Cookies and Royal Icing

Holy crap. I took so many photos of this recipe. Who knew that cookies would be so photogenic? And of course, being a Dorie Greenspan recipe, I only had to give it just a few tweaks to make sure they were tastier than they looked (I'm not much of a cookie decorator, apparently)

So yesterday I was invited to this Christmas party that my friend hosts every year, and it's always fun times because it's a chance to see a lot of my friends from high school and catch up on what they're up to. Although we're all in our fourth year of university, a lot of us aren't graduating (mine is a 4½ year program, while a lot of my friends in engineering are doing work terms, so won't be graduating until '09) while others had bigger news (one of my friends got into Harvard Law (!!!) but not surprisingly, none of us had engagement announcements yet although we joked about starting a "marriage pool").

I've always made cookies--one of my friends always requested this chocolate chip cookie recipe that I made, and I always felt it was a more creative "hostess" gift than a bottle of booze. Besides, this year they managed to buy $530 worth of alcohol (they're doing ENGINEERING (read: oilfields) work terms in ALBERTA, after all, so they have crazy disposable income) so if I did buy something it would've just been a drop in the bucket. Anyway, I decided to go more holiday this year and tackle some gingerbread-like spice cookies.

One thing I really admire about Dorie is that she didn't start cooking until she got married, and is now this crazy-amazing baker and cookbook writer. When I saw her entry for chocolate, vanilla and spice roll-out cookies I knew I had to try at least one recipe this holiday season. The reviews on Epicurious said that the spice recipe tasted a little mild, so I doubled all the spices (except ginger) in my recipe (at the bottom of this entry). Other than that, the dough was easy to put together (especially when you have an electric hand mixer, or better yet, one of those fancy KitchenAid stand mixers), and then I just threw it in the fridge to toughen up overnight.

I started the whole process of rolling, cutting, baking and icing at 1 pm the next day, and considering that this was the first time I made this recipe, it took me until about 4:30, so be forewarned that this is a whole afternoon-long activity.

Dorie has this really smart tip to roll out the dough between two pieces of parchment paper; you save yourself from flouring your counter and rolling pin (although in retrospect, the dough does get a little sticky, so a little flour wouldn't have hurt) and it's easier to lift the shapes from the dough because you can help it along underneath.

After a lot of re-rolling, cutting and baking, somehow, with the inconsistency of dough thickness and size of my cookies, I ended up with somewhere between 3 or 4 dozen cookies to decorate.

The one thing I love about Dorie's icing recipe is that it doesn't contain butter. However, while it's not high in fat and has the added protein of egg whites, it's still very high in sugar, although I'm too lazy to find a recipe for buttercream icing to compare the calories gram-for-gram, not to mention that high amounts of simple carbs (i.e. sugars) mess up your blood sugar levels and may play a role in the mechanism that causes heart disease. Oh, and sorry for putting everyone who ate these cookies at risk of Salmonella by not using pasteurized egg whites. Anyway, while Dorie's recipe tells you to use two eggs, for me, it took three to get the right texture. (Note: I now realize that I misread the recipe and put in ¼ cup extra of icing sugar. Ummm...)

Hannah, the amazing 18-year-old vegan with her own cookbook who bakes and knits like she doesn't have any assignments or exams, has some great decorating tips (and photos, she really is too modest) over at her blog, which I found to be really helpful. I did end up using a sandwich bag, which fortunately worked out fine (disposable pastry bags were nowhere to be found in Superstore--not so "super" now, are we?) and I'm blaming my crappy designs on a tip that was a touch too wide. I tried to be tricky by putting the ugliest cookies on the bottom of the tin that I gave to my friend, and then progressively layering the nicer ones on top, but who knew he'd end up being the last one at the cookies? (He made fun of my spade-shaped cookie that did not look like a spade.) Here are some of my nicer ones.

Sadly, my 10-year-old sister seems to be better at this than I am, so I let her do about a dozen or so.

But judging by how fast the box and the plate that I left at home for my family emptied themselves, these cookies were sure tastier than they looked and they just might become a holiday staple.

Spice Roll-out Cookies
Adapted from Dorie Greenspan's recipe
Makes anywhere between 20 and 60 cookies

• 250 mL (1 cup) unsalted butter*
• 185 mL (¾ cup) golden brown sugar**
• 125 mL (½ cup) light molasses
• 1 egg
• 2 mL (½ tsp) vanilla
• 875 mL (3½ cups all-purpose flour)
• 10 mL (2 tsp) ground ginger
• 7 mL (1½ tsp) ground cinnamon
• 5 mL (1 tsp) baking soda
• 2 mL (½ tsp) salt
• 2 mL (½ tsp) ground allspice
• 2 mL (½ tsp) ground nutmeg
• 2 mL (½ tsp) dry mustard
• 1 mL (¼ tsp) ground cloves

1. Using an electric mixer, cream butter and sugar together, about 3 min. Add molasses, beat until fluffy, about 2 min. Add egg, beat until well blended, about 1 min. Reduce speed to low, beat in vanilla. Sift in dry ingredients, beat on low speed just to blend.
2. Gather dough into a ball and divide in half. Form each half into a ball and flatten into disk. Wrap disks separately in plastic and chill in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours.
3. Position rack in centre of oven; preheat to 175°C (350°F). Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Roll out dough between two sheets of waxed paper to ⅓ - ½ cm (⅛" - ¼") thickness for smaller and larger cookies, respectively. Space cookies 2 cm (1") apart on cookie sheet. Bake for 8 (for smaller, thinner cookies) - 12 (for larger, thicker cookies) min, until firm on top and slightly darker around edges. Cool completely on rack before decorating with Royal Icing.

*If you use salted butter, just omit the salt from the recipe.
**I used regular brown sugar and it was fine.