A Gift in a Jar for Oatmeal Cookie Fans

. . . like my grandpa. My mom always makes sure I prepare some oatmeal raisins for him. And why not — they’re yummy.

They almost feel healthy, too, with all that whole grain and fruit. They’re a great cookie for everyone to make after swearing to those New Year’s resolutions!

Quaker Oats provides the recipe for creating the jars on their site. It’s kind of nice because it even incorporates the fat yet, like Bisquick, it doesn’t require refrigeration. That’s miracle of shortening for you.

Don’t forget to print out the cookie recipe to attach to the jars, else your recipient won’t know what to do with a jar full of floury oats.

Good Housekeeping’s 30 Days of Cookies

For more cookie-recipe goodness, check out Good Housekeeping magazine’s chock-full-of-pictures cookie page.

Some look especially good:

Cinnamon Spirals

Spumoni Icebox Cookies

Fig-Filled Moons

The Whole Six Years

I’ve collected all the 12 Days of Cookies recipes on one page in the Recipe Box section of the site. You can view and download each individual recipe. Of course, should you prefer to see them in original form on the Food Network site, please visit my blog entries for each year’s links:

• The 12 Days of Cookies: 2002
• The 12 Days of Cookies: 2003
• The 12 Days of Cookies: 2004
• The 12 Days of Cookies: 2005
• The 12 Days of Cookies: 2006
• The 12 Days of Cookies: 2007

Come next year, I’ll update the collection with whatever cookies come our way. For now, though, bon appétit and happy holidays!

The 12 Days of Cookies Collection

The 12 Days of Cookies: 2007

Drumroll, please!

Today, I will provide all the lovely souls of this world with a list of links to this year’s (that is, 2007’s) 12 Days of Cookies recipes. You have this list if you managed to subscribe to the newsletter before it ended in early December, but if you missed out (and it’s easy to miss out if you hadn’t thought about Christmas cookies as early as November), you’ve probably noticed that they don’t post a list of the featured recipes on the Food Network web site’s 12 Days of Cookies page.

Grinches.

Anyway, I’m most looking forward to trying the Double Chocolate Sable Cookies, Walnut Sugar Cookies (Kourabiedes), and cute Cinnamon Stars (Zimtsterne) next Christmas when I have an oven again. However, most of this year’s recipes look intriguing because of the holiday world tour theme the 2007 list has going on. Take a minute to check out the trivia bits presented with each recipe to bone up on your cookie history.

Food Network’s 12 Days of Cookies, 2007

• Day 1: Almond Lace Cookies (Florentines)
• Day 2: Moravian Spice Cookie Wafers
• Day 3: Double Chocolate Sable Cookies
• Day 4: Walnut Sugar Cookies (Kourabiedes)
• Day 5: Cinnamon Stars (Zimtsterne)
• Day 6: Crumb Cookies (Fregolata)
• Day 7: Sesame Rings
• Day 8: Chocolate Oat Cakes
• Day 9: Peanut Butter Nanaimo Bar
• Day 10: Spoon Cookies (Lusikkaleivat)
• Day 11: Fruit and Nut Bars (Mazurkas)
• Day 12: Pistachio Melbas
• Bonus Cookie: Coconut-Peanut Cookies (Galletas Maria)

I must give credit to the author of the MacGourmet blog for importing all the recipes for us. You can download the file collection from his blog or grab a copy from here.

Download 12 Days of Cookies 2007 into MacGourmet.

The 12 Days of Cookies: 2005

The big holiday dash is upon us all, and we’re almost through counting down the 12 Days of Cookies lists. For all those searching folks, I will be posting links to the Food Network’s 2007 recipes on Thursday. It’d be nice if they did it themselves, but whatever.

The year 2005 might be seen as the zenith (so far) of Food Network’s Christmas cookie efforts. The recipes from this list got their own television special and a viewer cookie contest that brought us the recipe for S’More Rockin’ Reindeer Ravioli.

I remember watching that special a couple of years ago (by the way, it aired again yesterday and will rerun on Dec. 22 also). It’s hosted by a guy whose once heavily promoted primetime show has been demoted to the near-graveyard of midweek mornings. The bit on the Ravioli has the creator talking about how she came up with the recipe as a way to one up the guy who always brought a creative original cookie to the work party every year.

And a merry Christmas to you, too!

The Rosemary Cheese Spritz are quite tasty and an excellent excuse to pull out the cookie press again. I’ll be making the Booze Balls in the coming week for our Christmas celebrations as they don’t require baking.

While the 2005 cookies were still listed on Food Network’s main 12 Days of Cookies page as of 2007, if you want to check out how the list looked circa 2005, I uncovered another old, orphaned 12 Days of Cookies page. As you can see, we have to be thankful that we get links to any of the previous years at all nowadays.

Food Network’s 12 Days of Cookies, 2005

• Day One: 3 in 1 Sugar Cookies
• Day Two: Booze Balls
• Day Three: Rosemary Cheese Spritz Cookies
• Day Four: Chocolate Dipped Hazelnut Shortbread
• Day Five: Chocolate Peppermint Pizzelle
• Day Six: Christmas Citrus Squares
• Day Seven: Ginger Cookie
• Day Eight: Hazelnut Crunch
• Day Nine: Mexican Wedding Cookies
• Day Ten: Toasted Coconut Marshmallows
• Day Eleven: Sherry Butter Nut Drops
• Day Twelve: S’More Rockin’ Reindeer Ravioli

Download 12 Days of Cookies 2005 into MacGourmet.

The 12 Days of Cookies: 2004

And here we enter the realm of lists still available directly off the current (2007) Food Network web site.

I came to this list with a fever-pitch level of anticipation after my cookie adventures of the previous year. Of course, it couldn’t quite meet my high expectations (Cornmeal Wreaths? Made with cornflakes? What?), but looking back at the list now, I see several promising (and delicious, having made a few) recipes.

Maamoul, Ribbon Cookies, and Swedish Christmas Cookies have all hit our holiday table over the years. I was dying to try that Maamoul recipe as it sounded Middle Eastern with that date filling. Were I to make it again, I’d go all out and spring for those Medjool dates rather than the puny ones I ended up with.

If I was baking this year, I might try my hand at those Czech Squares in honor of our year abroad (we’ll be moving to the Czech Republic in May). Also, since I’m much less nut-averse than I used to be, I might try those tasty-looking Hazelnut-Mocha Macaroons.

Food Network’s 12 Days of Cookies, 2004

• Day One: Mixed Nut Honey Baklava
• Day Two: Triple Chocolate Cookie
• Day Three: Cinnamon Pecan Twist
• Day Four: Citrus Shortbreads
• Day Five: Cornmeal Wreaths
• Day Six: Czech Squares
• Day Seven: Ginger Spice Cookies
• Day Eight: White Chocolate Holiday Bark
• Day Nine: Maamoul: Stuffed Date-Orange Cookies
• Day Ten: Hazelnut-Mocha Macaroons
• Day Eleven: Ribbon Cookies
• Day Twelve: Swedish Christmas Cookies

Download 12 Days of Cookies 2004 in MacGourmet.

The 12 Days of Cookies: 2003

In my mind, 2003 is the Golden Age of the 12 Days of Cookies newsletter. It’s not really because of the recipes (though Almond Snowball Cookies did arrive in my consciousness with this round), the snazziness of the design that year, or the immense importance attached to the newsletter that year (we’ll have to wait for Round 2005 for that).

No, it stands out in my mind for it being the first time I encountered the Food Network’s Christmas cookie collection and the first time I started getting into the annual tradition of the cookie baking blitz.

The newsletter and the newfound fascination with baking fed into each other. I tried my hand at those Almond Snowballs, they turned out well, and so I wanted to bake some more. Of course, I turned to the newsletter then for more inspiration.

In later years, the 12 Days of Cookies newsletter would turn into a real promotional monster for the Food Network, something hyped all through the year and packed with videos, contests, TV tie-ins, and a whole nearly hidden section of the web site (what . . . ?). It’s such a big pull that in 2007 they didn’t even bother putting the recipes in the e-mails, knowing one and all would click through to all the advertising goodness on the Web.

But now, in 2003, the newsletter is more an experiment and perhaps an attempt at spreading a little free Christmas cheer.

Major thanks go out to this forum archive, which provided me an ordered list of recipes for the 2003 newsletter. Where my copies of the newsletter ended up is a question only my dearly departed iBook can answer.

Food Network’s 12 Days of Cookies, 2003

• Day One: Almond Snowball Cookies
• Day Two: Southern Tea Cakes
• Day Three: Chocolate Thumbprint Cookies
• Day Four: Platinum Blondies
• Day Five: Paula’s Loaded Oatmeal Cookies
• Day Six: Thimble Cookies
• Day Seven: Almond Brittle: Croccante
• Day Eight: Jam Thumbprint Cookies
• Day Nine: Holiday Cookie Projects: Snowflakes, Dreidel Trios, and Ornaments
• Day Ten: Chocolate Caramel Peanut Truffles
• Day Eleven: Pistachio Biscotti
• Day Twelve: Date Bar Cookies

Download 12 Days of Cookies 2003 into MacGourmet.

The 12 Days of Cookies: 2002

Last year, it frustrated me when the cookies featured in the (I thought) inaugural 2003 edition of the 12 Days of Cookies were demoted to pictureless status on the round-up page (I also found it frustrating that the current year’s cookies weren’t listed, but that’s another story). The 12 Days of Cookies newsletter has become a part of holiday tradition for me, and you can’t have a tradition without history.

This year, though! This year!

This year, the 2003 cookies — including my annual favorite, the Almond Snowballs — disappeared from the round-up page completely!

The travesty! Scrooges! Grinches!

I decided that I had to preserve this tradition myself, since Food Network seems to believe that recipes degrade with age, like leftovers, rather than improve, like fine wines.

Despite this negative attitude, all of the recipes from 12 Days past still exist in the Food Network online database. With a bit of searching on Google, I uncovered the lists from years past — I even discovered that a list from before 2003 existed!

And here is that list, from 2002 by my estimate. The page I found from an older version of the Food Network web site doesn’t give a date for the holiday season it covers. There’s a copyright from 2001 at the bottom, but there’s a notice about 2003’s edition being a newsletter instead of a web page, so I’m guessing that implies this list is from the year prior.

Most of the recipes are courtesy of Gale Gand, a Chicago pastry chef who used to have an afternoon show on the network called Sweet Dreams. Food Network doesn’t give enough airtime to baking or sweets, in my opinion. No one’s ever going to learn to create desserts from Ace of Cakes.

I’m going to link to each recipe on the Food Network site from here. Unfortunately, the links on that old page don’t work anymore, so I had to search for each recipe on the current site. That means I can’t be 100%, super-duper-positively certain that I selected the recipes that correspond to the list, as some titles had multiple matches. However, I’m pretty sure I deduced the correct recipes using the years listed and the pictures, which all look similar in style.

Food Network’s 12 Days of Cookies, 2002

• Day One: Ruth Moulton’s Spice Balls
• Day Two: Pecan Dreams
• Day Three: Coconut Macaroons
• Day Four: Lydia’s Austrian Raspberry Shortbread
• Day Five: Pizzelle: Thin Waffle Cookies
• Day Six: Old Fashioned Sugar Cookies
• Day Seven: Dried Cherry and Chocolate Biscotti
• Day Eight: Honey Oatmeal Cookies
• Day Nine: Chocolate Peanut Butter Thumbprint Cookies
• Day Ten: Holiday Rum Balls
• Day Eleven: Lollipop Cookies
• Day Twelve: Macadamia Nut Brittle

For anyone out there who uses MacGourmet to store their recipes, I’ve also created a compilation of all twelve 2002 holiday cookie recipes.

Download 12 Days of Cookies 2002 into MacGourmet.

One More for the Cookie Jar

I’ve posted all these other recipe links, so how’s about one more for all you MacGourmet users possibly out there.

The developer behind MacGourmet apparently is also a fan of Food Network’s 12 Days of Cookies, and he went to all the trouble of building MacGourmet files for each recipe. Go on over to his MacGourmet site and you can download them yourself.

Some More Christmas Cookies

Kraft sent me a lovely little newsletter with 12 suggestions for a festive Christmas (12 — get it?). Anyway, I thought I’d share a link to more cookie recipes on their site.

It’s December 14, after all — it’s really time to get cracking on the baking! Decisions, people!