A Tale Of Two Cookies

It’s not Christmas if I don’t make sugar cookies exactly as I did when I was a child. This means the exact recipe, rolling pin, cookie cutters, and sprinkles my mom used. Absolutely no frosting allowed!

One of my first cooking memories is of making Christmas sugar cookies with my mom - creaming the sinful combination of sugar and shortening in a bowl; rolling blonde, soft dough with a heavy wooden rolling pin, flouring green and red plastic cookie cutters shaped like candy canes, Santa Claus, and snowmen; pressing the cookie cutters into the dough – hopefully none stick, but some do; sprinkling green and red colored sugar crystals over the cookies and into the depressed patterns left by the cookie cutters; baking until the edges hint of gold; then eating warm, sugary cookies straight from the oven.

I found myself making rugelach the same day I made sugar cookies. I have no memories to share of rugelach, but I can share my recent experience of baking rugelach for Hanukkah. Rugelach is definitely fancier than the sugar cookie and the process is much more involved.

As I chilled the dough for eight hours; divided the dough into four; rolled the dough into perfectly thin rectangles; spread the rectangles with jam, raisins, walnuts, and cinnamon sugar; tightly rolled the dough up into logs, all the while taking the softened dough in and out of the refrigerator to chill, I wondered if this cookie was too difficult for a small child to make? Do people have fond memories of making rugelach as a child like I have of sugar cookies? At first I didn’t think I would put a small child to the task of making a cookie so involved, but then I countered that children enjoy copying and participating in their parent’s activities. If your mother made rugelach, you made rugelach along side her. And, of course, you have fond memories – it’s a cookie!