Baking holiday cookies is something we look forward to all year long, but the sheer number of cookie dough recipes to make can be kind of overwhelming. We only have so many bowls, and washing the KitchenAid mixer is a pain in the butt so we like to minimize switching between recipes as much as possible. But we don't want to be left with six dozen of the same exact cookie – where's the fun in a cookie plate that only has one type of treat on it? In past years we've just had to grin and bear it, but this year, celebrity cook and personality Chrissy Teigen has the ultimate solution: she's created one cookie dough recipe that makes three different holiday cookies. It's what we've been needing for years!
The base dough is pretty simple, a seven-ingredient sugar cookie dough. The idea is to split that dough into three portions, saving one third to make classic sugar cookies (with ombre icing, a la Chrissy), then mixing spices into one of the thirds for spice cookies, and mixing peanut butter into the other third to serve as the base dough for peanut butter and jelly thumbprint cookies.
The spice cookies sound delicious, sort of like a cross between ginger cookies and snickerdoodles. The spice blend includes cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg and then just a pinch of cayenne pepper to add some zing. The cookies are rolled in crunchy demarara sugar and spices before baking, and they come out of the oven crisp around the edges, a little soft inside and covered in a delightful sugar and spice blend.
The peanut butter and jelly thumbprint cookies are easy, too. You just add a few tablespoons of peanut butter to the cookie dough, roll your balls of cookie dough in crushed salted peanuts, then press your thumb into the center of each cookie and add a spoonful of jam in the hole left behind. Bake them up and you've got peanut butter and jelly cookies that'll bring you back to your favorite school lunches. Santa would probably love these with a glass of ice cold milk!
You can also make regular sugar cookies with the dough, which can be decorated and iced any way you like. Teigen favors a bright, neon ombre icing technique, but classic red and green sanding sugar would work, too.
Display your cookies on a beautiful serving tray, like this one from the Cravings by Chrissy Teigen line at Target, for maximum visual impact.
You could also package them up and ship them to someone you love – maybe the folks you'd normally do an in-person cookie swap with would like to get a shipment of home-baked love this year by mail.
Either way, you've got one cookie dough recipe that will result in three cookies that everyone in your life is sure to love.
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