more Christmas food prep

Yesterday I blogged the beginnings of our Christmas food preparations, starting with the panettone and finishing up with pie dough. After that we decided to only make bread stuffing, so there are the onions and celery. That means we have more of the bread to eat.

Look at how I'm staring down those cookies. This is serious business, cookies.

I have some notes to make about these cookies. The first is that the dough was extremely easy to work with, rolling it out and all. Just make sure you dust the counter, the dough, and the rolling pin with flour or confectioners' sugar, also the cookie cutter you use.

My initial impression was that the dough was light and flaky, yet the butter flavor was tempered by the ice cream. As the only sweetness in the dough came from the ice cream you might think it wouldn't be sweet enough. To a person with a big sweet tooth it might not, but I found it to be a nice level especially when you factor in the blob of jam in the center, practically pure sugar.

Now here is where I started being amazed. You see, the dough was beginning to develop that certain elasticity that comes when the gluten has overdeveloped by overworking the dough. I figured the subsequent batches would be rather tough and chewy instead of light, flaky, and delicate. Instead, while the shapes shrunk in diameter, they rose astoundingly high. I attribute this to the dough being unintentionally folded as you would do when making puff pastry or any sort of croissant-like dough. I like the smaller stars better. Delicate-looking, cute, and layers of flaky goodness.