Rose Beranbaum’s Recipes
Christmas cookie baking was a tradition in my house when I was growing up, so I continued it after I met my husband and we set up house, and while my kids were little, I’d invite over another mom and her kids to help. We’d spend the whole day baking recipes my mother had given me. Then an aunt gave me Rose’s Christmas Cookies. The author is Rose Levy Beranbaum who also wrote The Cake Bible. Our aunt took authors around Dallas when they were on book tours, so the book was signed in red and green ink by Rose herself.
For years we baked frantically out of this book, and always thought that we were just to busy and challenged to find the chapter called Cookies to Make with Kids, but a few years into this book we discovered that the chapter was missing and that there were two of a previous one. A very special book indeed.
This year, Martha and I, baked together. She made oatmeal candy cane cookies and I started in on a long list I had, then got sidetracked and made the crazy French macarons that drive me crazy. Martha meticulously shaped and frosted her cookies and I tried to get her interested in making one of Rose’s Christmas cookies. “Do you want to make some Scottish shortbread cathedrals?”
“You’re not going to drag me into your complicated world,” was her very wise answer.