Home › Christmas Dinners › Christmas Star Cookies
Christmas Star Cookies
Cream 1/2 cup margarine with 1/2 cup sugar, add 1/2 cup honey, and 5 beaten egg yolks, the juice of an orange and its grated rind. Then stir into it 3 teaspoons baking powder with enough flour to make stiff enough to roll. 1/8 teaspoon salt.
When enough flour is added, roll out, cut with star cutter. Bake moderate (400 degrees) oven 10 min. Ice with orange icing.
A soft, honey-sweetened rolled cookie in the 1930s style, leaning on egg yolks and citrus rather than butter. The flour is left to the cook's judgement, which is the only real difficulty.
- Flour quantityThe original gives no figure. With this much liquid — honey, five yolks, and the juice of an orange — expect roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups of all-purpose flour to reach a rollable dough. Add it in stages and stop when the dough just stops sticking; extra flour makes these dry and hard.
- Chill before rollingHoney doughs stay slack at room temperature. Wrap and refrigerate at least an hour, then roll about 1/4 inch thick on a lightly floured board, working with half the dough at a time and keeping the rest cold.
- The oven figureThe text says "moderate" but prints 400F, which runs hotter than most charts' moderate range. Follow the number rather than the word, and watch closely: honey browns fast, and 400F for 10 minutes is the outer limit. Check at 7 minutes for thin cookies and pull them when the edges are just golden.
- Margarine1930s margarine was firmer and less watery than most tub spreads today. Use a stick margarine or unsalted butter; soft spreads with high water content will slacken the dough further.
- Salt placementThe 1/8 teaspoon of salt is listed after the flour but belongs with it — whisk salt and baking powder into the flour before adding, so both distribute evenly.
- Baking powderThree teaspoons works out to about a teaspoon per cup of flour: ordinary for a cake, high for a rolled cookie, and it will give a puffed, cakey result rather than a crisp one. If you want sharp star points that hold their shape, reduce to two.
- Orange icingNone is specified. A plain one is about 1 1/2 cups confectioners' sugar beaten with 2 to 3 tablespoons orange juice and a little grated rind, thinned drop by drop to a spreading consistency.
- YieldAround four to five dozen cookies from a 2 1/2-inch star cutter. Iced cookies keep about five days in a tin; the honey keeps them softening rather than staling.