DIY or BUY: Christmas Cookies

Stay away from any recipe involving candy canes.

Photo credit: Hannah Nicole, CC BY 2.0.

The memories are starting to fade, but I still remember a time before I began crushing candy canes. Dinosaurs roamed the Earth, then a meteor wiped them all out probably — I’m not sure; I was too busy trying to pulverize the hardest substance known to man — then they slowly turned to fossil fuels; then those fossil fuels cost a quarter a gallon; then they cost a lot more; then someone invented a game about crushing candy, a game almost as painful and endless as what I was going through. Almost.

When I decided to do this DIY series, I knew I was going to end on cookies, something I have made many, many times over the years, something I don’t whinge about (that’s how the British spell “whine”), something that would, after three articles looking like an incompetent fool, would make me look like the budding Nigella Lawson I know myself to be. But these could not be any ordinary chocolate chip cookies. They had to be cookies that would beat fancy store-bought cookie trays, or, my personal favorite Christmas cookie assortment, Trader Joe’s Astounding Multi-Flavor Joe-Joe’s*.

So I found two aww-some cookie recipes to try. First, a Candy Cane Cookie Dough Truffle from a lifestyle blog called Inside Bru Crew Life (I’m not making that up). Second, the cover model of the December 2016 issue of Food Network Magazine: Peppermint Pinwheels.

Candy Cane Cookie Dough Truffles

Peppermint Pinwheels : Food Network Specials : Food Network

Which is how we ended up at an epoch-long attempt to turn twelve candy canes into a fine powder.

Year 141,728 BC.

Some people use rolling pins. Some people use hammers. Other people just throw the candy canes into a mine with some coal for a pressurized eon or two. These various options all take approximately the same amount of time.

After the candy canes were finely ground… okay, coarsely ground… okay, basically in eighths… the rest of the cookie dough truffle recipe was fairly simple. I did not bother with the shortening, and I ran out of chocolate to enrobe said cookie dough truffles, but they ended up just fine. Not $12.74 fine, but fine.

What the truffles look like on the outside.

And how they measure up on the inside.

Despite not requiring sacrificing the better part of one’s life to dismembering candy canes, the Peppermint Pinwheels actually ended up being the more involved recipe. Not a lot more work, just more time because you had to refrigerate the dough between each step. And, like a New Kids on the Block song, there were a lot of steps.

Okay, it looks like a lot of work, but it’s not really. And remember how lazy I am.

That’s what you get when you make dolled-up sugar cookies, which is essentially what the Peppermint Pinwheels are. If you’re crazy for sugar cookies, the worst of all cookies according to science (excepting mincemeat), then Peppermint Pinwheels were made for you. They look great, even if you use green and red sugar instead of the coarse white sugar recommended by Food Network Magazine.

Not bad, eh?

If you have normal, human taste buds, however, these cookies just don’t measure up. Not including vanilla, salt, baking powder, flour and sugar, which I already had, and divvying up the cost of the peppermint extract with the truffles, these cookies cost $10.16 to make. With the other ingredients, however, that could easily put you over $20, to about 50 cents a cookie.

The Joe-Joe’s on the other hand were $6.99 for 24 cookies, or 29 cents a cookie. Ultimately it seems it’s more cost-effective, less of a hassle, and more delicious to just buy some cookies.

Unless…

Unless you’re spending time with family. There really is no price point for baking and decorating cookies with one’s relatives, treats that taste far inferior to something you could buy at either a bakery or grocery store: over-frosted gingerbread men, burned shortbread, rugelach no one likes, bark that breaks your teeth, and so on. That’s the stuff that the holidays are all about: not do it yourself, but do it together.

So, in sum, I still believe the unmotivated among us should shed their guilt about avoiding DIY projects, as they often as not are as expensive as buying things from the store. But building, making, or cooking a holiday gift as an excuse to spend time (and share costs) with a friend or family member? That wins out every time.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and see you next year.

*Seriously, what’s with the apostrophe in Joe-Joe’s, Trader Joe’s? Fire your copy editor.

Enjoy more of Kati Stevens here, here, here, and, I know, I know, this is madness, here.

Previously:

DIY or BUY: Gnomes