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| Mom's Butter Cookies, displayed on a poinsettia plate which she hand-painted in 1958. |
For as long as I can remember, there have been Mom's Butter Cookies for
Christmas. Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, my mom, Ann
Kozlina Gilbride, purchased an aluminum cookie press, and began to make dozen
upon dozen of butter cookies each holiday. Grandparents, siblings,
cousins, aunts, uncles and so many of her friends and co-workers enjoyed
those cookies over the years, either at our home or in cookie packets
that she made up to be taken home. Everyone knows what you're talking about when
you mention the Butter Cookies.
They would fill cookie tins and plates, row upon row of them: little
Christmas trees decorated with green sugar sprinkles, star-shaped ones
with not one, but exactly two chocolate chips pressed together in the
center (Mom was pretty particular that they look that way), and of
course, the little gingerbread-man shaped ones, with a cinnamon heart in
the center.
The smell of those butter cookies baking is one of my favorite memories
of Christmas, and one, luckily, I have been able to continue. Mom gave
me a plastic cookie press at one point, so the kids and I got to make the
cookies too.
After Mom passed in 2010, I asked for her cookie gun when we were going
through her house. But the next holiday, one piece of it slipped down
into the garbage disposal and bent, making it unusable. I still had the
plastic cookie press she had given me, so we still had cookies. But it
wasn't quite the same. Last year, the plastic press gave out—its discs
cracking, the press mechanism stripped.
But this year, I found the same vintage aluminum model as hers on eBay
and bought it. So, I will make the butter cookies again in a tradition
which has been ongoing for about 50 years now. My kids Anne and James
will help decorate.
If you have a cookie press, and want to recreate Mom's Butter Cookies, here's her recipe:
MOM'S BUTTER COOKIES
1 lb. unsalted butter, softened
1 c. sugar
2 eggs
5 c. pre-sifted flour.
1. Cream butter and eggs well
2. Add eggs and mix
3. Add flour 1 cup at a time (dough will be really thick)
4. Separate dough into 4 equal parts. Using food coloring, dye each
batch of dough a different color. Mom used yellow. blue, green and red,
to make pastel-colored cookies. (You will have to work color into dough
with your hands, and yes, having your hands streaked with dye for a few
days is part of the tradition!).
5. Using cookie press, press out a variety of shapes onto ungreased cookie sheets. Decorate as desired.
6. Bake at 350F degree for 10-15 minutes.
Merry Christmas to all!
Originally published 26 December 2019.
A Researcher's Aside—This year is a little different: I'm unable to make Mom's famous butter cookies, as I'm having shoulder surgery 4 days before Christmas, and my right "cookie gun arm" is not up to snuff right now. So, bake some up and have one or two for me!
The cookies will be back next year, but Leaves on the Tree posts will be temporarily on hold, as computer work is off the table for now. I pre-scheduled a few more posts to take us through the beginning of January. Hopefully, I'll be back soon after that.
Until next time...
Hope your surgery goes well and your recuperation is smooth. Happy Holidays!
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