It's that cookie time of the year

By Melinda Forbes

It's December and cooks' heads are filled with visions of chocolate chips, brown sugar, oatmeal, raisins, spices and sprinkles. Cookies are a part of the holiday tradition. And homemade cookies? There's not a cheesecake or a chocolate mousse out there that can beat a warm, gingerbread man, sugary shortbread or peanut butter blossom just out of the oven.

"Hardly anyone refuses a cookie," writes Anita Chu in her "Field Guide to Cookies: How to Identify and Bake Virtually Every Cookie Imaginable," (Quirk Books, 2008).

It all has something to do with our childhood associations of watching mom stirring a batch of dough or sliding a warm treat off the spatula and onto our plate, she writes.

Cookie making doesn't have to be a huge production. Simple cookies dropped from a teaspoon - such as chocolate chip or oatmeal - can be stirred together in minutes with a minimum of ingredients and will soon have the kitchen full of aromas.

Portsmouth's Betty Douglass, a retired home economist and food writer, says she and her daughters traditionally gather for a marathon cookie baking session. In their heyday, they baked as many as 2,000 holiday cookies. This year the scene will take place in early December in her daughter's newly renovated kitchen, and they've trimmed the numbers somewhat.

They've picked up a few new techniques over the years, too. Douglass now uses parchment paper for most rolled and cut-out cookies.

Her suggestion: Roll the dough out between sheets of parchment paper. Because you need very little flour, it's less messy and much easier, she says.

After you've rolled out the dough between the papers, pull off the top sheet, cut out the cookies as desired then pick out the dough between the cut-outs.

Flip the piece of parchment with the cut-out cookies onto the cookie sheet, peel off the paper and put the cookies in the oven. It's quicker and easier than transferring each cut-out cookie from the countertop to the cookie sheet, Douglass says, and you can reuse the paper a few times.

Maureen Humphreys, of Virginia Beach, a retired middle school teacher, has cookie decorating parties not just at Christmas but throughout the year -snowmen and snowflakes for January, hearts for Valentine's Day, flowers for spring, flags for Flag Day...

Her parties started with children. When the parents saw how much fun the kids were having they wanted in. Now - by popular demand -Humphreys is hosting a cookie-decorating day this month just for adults.

Using a recipe she calls simply Holiday Cut-Out Cookies, she does the baking in advance so the decorators can go right to work with different colors of icing, sprinkles and such.

Today's recipes range from simple to a little more ambitious, but all are easily doable. Chances are you've got many of the ingredients on hand already.

So bake, eat and create aromatic memories for your own family.

Melinda Forbes, (757) 446-2360, flavor@pilotonline.com