Cooking up Christmas cheer

During the Christmas season just before her grandson Zachary turned 3, Linda Hammer got out the flour, sugar and molasses and the two of them made gingerbread boys.

They also made a mess.

"As I was cleaning up the kitchen, I thought, 'What was I thinking, baking cookies with a 2-year-old?'" recalled Hammer, who lives in Chesterfield County. "Just then Zachary burst back into the room and said, 'That was so fun, Nana. Thank you for making those boys with me!'"

What she was doing was starting a family tradition.

Five years later, Zachary is almost 8, and his brother, Matthew, almost 6, and they're still baking gingerbread boys at Christmas with their grandmother.

That's the story in a lot of families, where making cookies and other treats is as big a part of the holidays as decorating a tree or exchanging gifts.

Katie Karaffa of Stuarts Draft makes cookies with her daughters, 5-year-old Gracie and 21-month-old Hope. The girls help roll the dough and shake the sprinkles. On Christmas Eve, they will count out an even number of red and green cookies and put them on a special plate for Santa Claus.

"I love making cookies with my girls but especially at Christmastime, because almost all of the cookies that are made are recipes that have been handed down to me from my grandparents and also my husband's," Karaffa said.

Her favorites are Icebox Cookies "because they are easy to make with kids, and they were my favorite to make with my mom."

Baking cookies is old hat for Hammer, who grew up on a farm in Pennsylvania and at a young age started taking on kitchen chores.

"My mom was always busy helping my dad on the farm, so I would always be the cookie baker," Hammer said.

She's been making molasses sugar cookies for 50 years. At Christmas, she adds extra flour and uses cookie cutters and transforms them into gingerbread boys.

"This is an old recipe," she said, "and very user-friendly!"

Some cookies are ridiculously easy, such as the noodle cookies or haystacks that sports columnist Paul Woody and I make in our latest "Words Worth Eating" video on www.TimesDispatch.com.

Others are complicated. But in any case, attention to detail can make the difference between a successful batch of cookies and a not-so-successful one, said Veronica Perez, who writes a food blog, Veronica's Test Kitchen (http://kitchenmusings.typepad.com), and operates an online bakery, Petites Bouchées, for which she makes some of the best cookies anywhere. Her Parisian-style macarons, at once light and filling, rich and flavorful, deserve to be called something more than cookies. They also are a lot more "finicky" -- as Perez puts it -- than most home cooks would be willing to deal with, particularly at the busy holiday season.

But the keys to good cookies -- use good ingredients and measure them accurately -- are the same for any kind of recipe, said Perez, who by day works as a database administrator at Media General, lives in Glen Allen and comes from a family of cooks, including her parents, who operated restaurants in the Philippines, where she grew up.

"Your cookies are going to taste as good as what you put in them," Perez said.
Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .