This is not a unique thing to say, but I love Christmas. I love the trees and tinsel and glitter and all of the lights. I love when people dress in sparkly clothes and cozy sweaters. I love parties and sharing mulled wine and eggnog and eating until our sparkly clothes feel too tight and staying up until the candles burn into wax puddles on the dessert plates I use as candle holders. I love making gift lists and finding trinkets out in the adorably decorated shops for all of the people I love.
This year, the holiday season is a little different. Birth is imminent, so we won’t be traveling to the various homes full of family and friends that Christian and I share. I won’t be packing a cooler with sugar cream pies and frozen potato rolls. I haven’t chosen a Christmas outfit, and I won’t have to manage overstuffing the suitcase with my backup outfits. I won’t be helping my mom set out sweet pickles and shrimp cocktail while simultaneously making dumplings and sweet potato casserole and looking every time my niece says, “Aunt V, watch!” and trying to seem cool while my palms sweat nervously with my pre-teen nephews. Rish and I won’t have to navigate ice storms or stop for McDonald’s breakfast on our way from a Christmas celebration in one corner of Ohio to another celebration in the opposite corner.
Instead, Rish and I will be hunkered down in Chicago with our beloved Babushka dog and our sweet unborn baby. I’m excited for this new holiday. As our baby takes up an increasing amount of real estate both in my physical body and my mental space, a holiday spent sleeping in and staying in pajamas and abandoning any sort of schedule sounds incredible. I’m planning a menu for two with only our favorite dishes—his, mashed potatoes; mine, sweet potato casserole—and steak instead of turkey or ham because why not! We can! This is uniquely our holiday, and that feels really cool.
I also am going to miss some of the chaos. As much as I may have tried to argue this previously, the chaos is part of the fun for me. Christmas often requires trying to get a bunch of people with different motivations and schedules and preferences into one, often too small space. It makes a lot of sense to me that for this reason—and often many others—some do not really care for the holiday season. Life is busy enough, so the additional to-do lists and RSVPs can feel daunting. I have to admit to myself, though, that I find this kind of chaos enticing. Perhaps it’s a futile endeavor to create a holiday party or occasion where every guest feels cared for exactly as they need to be, and as I write it out, it does kind of sound like people pleasing, which internet therapists tell me to stop doing. But the part I love is not everyone having a perfect holiday and smiling through grief and traveling so much that they’re half asleep through dinner, it’s noticing all of it.
I want to have everyone’s favorite beverage, even though that takes up precious space in my small fridge. I want to think about menu-planning for weeks and know which dishes will excite which guests and see their faces when they finally dig in. I want someone to overpower a room with tall tales and half-drunken monologues so that the other, quieter guests have plenty to debrief about later. I want to get creative with my serving dishes when I realize, always when it’s too late, that I somehow still only own one 13” x 9” pan but have three different casseroles to make. I want some people to come too early and some to come late and for both to sort of annoy me in the moment. I love when that annoyance settles into acceptance because it takes all of those people to create the organic experience of this exact celebration. It’s all welcome because every detail both matters and doesn’t matter at all, and I love trying to find the balance between the two. At the risk of positioning myself as too sincere about the Wicked promotional interviews—what I love is creating and holding space for all of it.
In lieu of my normal holiday chaos this year, I decided to give myself a project. 12 days of Christmas cookies. I decided on this project last week, so I’ve been scrambling to gather family favorites and research cookie histories and watch YouTube videos to help me develop each recipe to be the pinnacle of my own personal favorite flavors of the holidays. I’ve been testing and highlighting notes and crossing out baking times and redlining ingredients when they added little to the finished product. The results are, in my opinion, an impressive but familiar, beautiful but humble, well-balanced lineup of cookies to help us celebrate Christmas chaos. I’d like to imagine that there’s a cookie here for everyone who I’d otherwise be sharing physical space with this holiday season. If not, sorry! That’s all part of the chaos, too.
Each morning for the next twelve days, I’ll be sharing a recipe with you. Not every recipe has a family history or long story, so I’m not going to waste too much time writing introductions—something the “jump to recipe” button on many food blogs tells me isn’t a deal breaker for most people. This project was intended to keep me busy, to help me keep the chaos alive, and it’s done that. My kitchen is cluttered with sprinkles and coconut flakes and chocolate chips. The handle on the freezer has flour smudges and our freezer is stacked with trays of cookies that I have to decide if I’m going to give away or keep for myself in these last few weeks of pregnancy. The workers at my local Mariano’s all know what I’m up to because I have already been an obscene number of times to pick up ingredients, and I’m feeling rushed to nail down some of these multi-step cookies so that they still feel approachable for you to make. It’s magic.
Today, I’m starting with a classic for many, including us at the Sakosky house. My mom always called them chocolate snowflakes, but the internet pretty consistently refers to them as chocolate crinkle cookies. This recipe isn't my mom’s, but it’s damn close and it still goes down smooth with a glass of milk. Yes, dairy milk. No, not raw milk—we don’t need that kind of chaos this holiday season.
I can’t wait to share this and the rest of my cookie recipes with you! As always, I appreciate questions and comments, so don’t hesitate to reach out! Love you <3
CHOCOLATE SNOWFLAKES
Makes 30 cookies*
1 ¼ cup all-purpose flour
½ cup cocoa powder
1 ½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon baking soda
¾ teaspoon salt
1 stick unsalted butter, room temperature
1 cup dark brown sugar**
½ cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
6 oz semisweet chocolate, melted
1 teaspoon vanilla
¼ cup espresso
½ cup granulated sugar, for baking
½ cup powdered sugar, for baking
*This dough requires chilling in the fridge overnight—plan accordingly!
**You can use light brown, too! I just had dark, and I sort of love the extra caramel flavor it adds.
In a medium-sized mixing bowl, whisk together the flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Set aside.
In the bowl of a Kitchenaid or a large mixing bowl, combine the butter and both sugars. Mix with the paddle or a handheld mixer on medium-low speed until there is no more butter visible and the mixture looks less sandy than when you began. You don’t want a ton of air in this cookie, so don’t try to speed this up. It should take about five minutes. Don’t forget to scrape down the sides and bottom of the bowl once or twice.
Add the eggs one at a time with the mixer running on low, letting each egg full incorporate before adding the next. Again, it’ll help to stop the mixer and scrape the sides down with a spatula with each addition.
Add the melted chocolate, vanilla, and espresso and mix on low until barely combined. Dump all of the dry ingredients at once and mix on low until just a few streaks of dry ingredients remain. Stop the mixer and use a spatula to finish folding in the dry ingredients, taking care to get down deep into the bottom of the bowl.
Wrap the dough tightly with plastic wrap and let it rest overnight in the refrigerator.
When you're ready to bake, set the oven to 325 degrees. Prepare two sheet trays with parchment paper. Set ½ cup granulated sugar in a small bowl and ½ cup powder sugar in another small bowl.
Now, things are about to get messy. Use a 1 oz scoop or measure roughly 2 tablespoons of dough per cookie. I like to scoop all of the dough then go back and roll the cookies into balls because a) it’s more efficient & I can’t turn off my kitchen brain, b) again, messy… this dough is going to get your hands messy.
Roll all the dough into balls and then drop them in granulated sugar and coat them completely. Then, roll the cookies in powdered sugar. If the chocolate seems to be melted too quickly (it was for me, pregnancy makes you hot), then you can put the cookie dough back in the fridge or freezer for a bit before you continue.
Once all the cookies are rolled and coated in both sugars, it’s time to bake. If you have large sheet trays, you might be able to fit them on your sheet trays, but I had to do three batches with 10 cookies on each tray. Most importantly, leave roughly 2 inches in between each cookie.
Bake the cookies for 10-ish minutes, until the cookies crack and in the cracks, it looks sort of like a wet sponge, but not like raw dough. Does that make sense? Oh well.
Allow the cookies to cool for about 2 minutes on the tray before transferring to a wire rack to cool. Eat one of these warm with a glass of milk, I beg you. The rest will last four-ish days well-wrapped at room temperature.
Comments