Just as most years, I try to do some baking for the holiday period, either just providing dessert for the family meals, or like this year, as homemade gifts for my relatives and friends. I was extremely short on time this year, and only got around to even planning my baking on the morning of Friday, December 23rd (with the family dinner the next day on the 24th and a load of work I still had to finish as well). So as usual, I was racing against the clock.
The recipe isn’t new, I’ve used it many times in the past, and it can be found in detail at the bottom of this post. The only change I made was to replace the 1/2 teaspoon of cinnamon with the same amount of a spéculoos spice mix that my brother gave me, which contains cinnamon, coriander seeds, nutmeg, anise, ginger, chili, and cardamom. For the purpose of these cookies, and to save myself the time and trouble of rubbing the butter into the flour, I opted to use a food processor as a shortcut. So once I had the dry ingredients mixed together, I poured them in a food processor, added the cubed, cold butter, and pulsed until I obtained a sandy consistency. This was especially helpful since I ended up preparing 3x the recipe in order to ensure that I had enough cookies. I also used the slice-and-bake method to again handle the time crunch, forming the dough into logs (roughly 4.5 cm in diameter) and refrigerating those on halved paper towel tubes to minimize flattening. Once firm, I could then slice into individual cookies, with each cookie round being roughly 7 mm thick. The cookies did spread and grow a lot more than I expected, so I ended up with bigger cookies.
For the decorations, I needed 3 things: melted chocolate, red M&Ms (candy-coated chocolates) for the nose, and pretzels for the antlers. I fully expected to need to sift through packs of the candies to just keep the right color, but I ended up having to do the same for the pretzels, as the store I went to (again, on Friday 23rd, the day before I was going to be giving these out) didn’t sell those on their own. So I had to get a pack of cocktail snacks that had mini crackers, normal pretzels, and pretzel sticks. Then it was a matter of using the chocolate as glue to stick down a red M&M near the middle of the cookie, followed by using a skewer to make 2 dots above it for eyes. The more difficult part was to cut or break the pretzels in a way that would allow at least one part to resemble an antler. As I went along cutting the pretzels, I separated the usable pieces between two bowls for right and left antlers (and yes, I did end up with a lot of broken scraps). Then I glued these on the top part of the cookies with more chocolate.
As you can see in the picture above, the I ended up semi-successful at keeping the cuts clean, and near the end ended up just cutting the pretzels in half which left a more rounded loop at the bottom of each antler. Also, can you spot the reindeer for which I forgot an antler? 😀 With a triple recipe, I ended up with 91 cookies, with a batch already having been sent off to one part of the family. 5 of these were considered “defects” as they were made from the end of my dough logs and thus more irregular and tend to be smaller as well. I gave these to my niece to snack on without adding them to my herd of reindeer.
In addition to these cookies, I also baked mini lemon cakes (4 batches of 8) which I had intended to glaze but was unable to due to my last-minute rush. I then packaged them in cellophane packets, with 1 mini cake (hidden behind the cookies) and 2 reindeers per pack for those I was giving out on December 24th, and just a bunch of reindeer cookies for those I was handing out later.
Blue Blossoms Baking 