Scubasue, can you share the recipe for nutmeg logs? I’ve never heard of them but they sound yummy!
@scubasue yes pls share the recipe here! Thanks
Of course.
First check out a picture: http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5205/5280541402_d87f636d5c.jpg
Cookies:
3 c flour
1 1/2 t nutmeg
1 t baking powder
1 c butter
3/4 c sugar
1 egg
2 t vanilla
1 1/2 t rum extract
Frosting:
1 1/2 T butter
1/2 t vanilla
1/2 t rum extract
1 1/2 c powdered sugar
1 1/2 T cream
Cookies:
Sift together flour, nutmeg and baking powder. Set aside. Cream butter and sugar, mix in egg, vanilla and rum extract. Add dry ingredients.
With hands, shape dough into 1/2 inch ropes. Bake at 350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. When cool, frost while still in long ropes. Sprinkle with freshly grated nutmeg. I let the frosting set up for a few hours and then cut cookies in uniform lengths.
Frosting:
Cream butter, vanilla and rum extract. Blend in 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar. Beat well. Add cream. Beat until smooth. Frost the cookies with a pastry bag to look like bark, or frost flat and score with fork tines. (I pipe frosting on with pastry bag and basketweave or similar tip).
Hints:
-Fresh nutmeg makes a huge difference and worth the expense and trouble. Don’t skip it.
-Don’t try to substitute the cream with milk.
-To get uniform cookie lengths, I cut off all the ends and save them for myself! 
Make these cookies ahead of time…they get better after 2 or 3 days. They freeze well, mail well, and keep (in a covered container) for 2 to 3 weeks.
Two of my favorite cookies are Maida Heatter’s Plantation Pecan and what I refer to as Mrs. Cloran’s Hazelnut Cookies. (Mrs. Cloran is the person who gave me the recipe, but she got it from something like Gourmet or Bon Apetit.)
The hazelnut cookies are a shortbread log with one end dipped in dark chocolate. The Maida Heatter recipe is in her Book of Great Desserts. Unlike most pecan recipes, it is not too sweet.
What’s funny, is that googling for Maida’s recipe online, what should come up but a CC post of mine from 2014 recommending them! 
^It isn’t just our kids who will live in infamy on the internet!
Not a cookie … but peanut brittle.
My mom always made date-nut bread to give to friends, as well as for us to eat. She saved cans all year & baked the loaves in the cans. We spread cream cheese on the bread. Wow - thanks for the thread, because it brought back a very happy childhood memory.
Date nut bread with cream cheese is a fond childhood memory of mine too! Just not at Christmas. It was served as a side to a fruit plate at a restaurant where I worked. Can you buy it in any stores? I haven’t seen it for years (date nut bread).
We love classic spritz cookies and rum balls but my favorite are gingerbread cookies. The recipe is really called “grandmother’s spice diamonds” that my Mom cut out of the newspaper decades ago. A lot more than just ginger in there!
Anyway, we have some crazy cookie cutters so we have fun with it. One is a giant dragon that you need 2-3 spatulas to remove from the cookie sheet. We also have lots of tree shaped cookies cutters, so we sometimes bake them all together and overlapping and call it the Spice Forest. So much fun (so fattening…).
Day one cookie baking: Seven layer bars, PB w/ Hershey Kiss, PB with Reese’s.
I’m looking to add a cookie this year but need a recipe. The foldover jam kolaches. Who has a recipe that is delicate and light but does not have too many steps or complicated talent ???
In honor of my late MIL, I make Italian Christmas cookies, puffy and round and glazed with confectioners sugar and lemon juice, with a few tiny nonpareil sprinkles.
Also, Potato Chip Cookies, which are a basic butter cookie combined with crushed potato chips and dusted with powdered sugar. It’s got that salty/sweet thing going on, and everybody devours them.
Yes to the bourbon balls and rum balls!
I’ve made all kinds of Christmas cookies, but not so much any more. My favorite Christmas cookie story is when we made gingerbread men to hang on the tree. It was the 90’s and my daughter and her friends were little, and we named the cookies after the boys in “Hanson.” So we piped “Zac, Taylor and Isaac” on our men. After Christmas, we put them in the back yard as an offering for the squirrels. The only one the squirrels didn’t eat was Isaac. Poor Isaac Hanson was the oldest brother who was never considered to be a heartthrob. Even the squirrels didn’t want him. 
^^LOL!!!
I made chocolate truffles, but that is pretty much it as far as my “baking” this season goes.
Oh man I have got to get in gear. Haven’t baked a thing yet. Maybe tomorrow will be the day. I always start with spritz since you can make so many so fast. It feels like an accomplishment.
We decided this year to hold off until this Tuesday. We love Christmas cookies, but an entire month of stuffing ourselvs with our favorites is not good for our health, so we will have one week of baking instead. Yum. Peanut Blossoms, Mexican Wedding Cakes, a soft walnut cookie soaked in honey, my SIL’s butter cookies topped with a few chocolate chips gluing on a walnut half, a cardamom drop cookie, maybe a lemon refrigerator cookie with lemon icing. It’ll be great.
I make pounds and pounds of peanut butter fudge for gifts (and some for the family). Also two or three different kinds of squares. One with Ritz crackers and Skor chips, and the other with graham cracker crumbs and chocolate chips. I think that the only other ingredient is condensed milk. Very, very simple.
My favorite Christmas sweet from childhood was divinity. I guess it’s basically marshmallows and sugar with a pecan on top, but I used to love it. Sadly, these days, I gain 5 pounds if I eat anything with sugar in it, so no divinity for me anymore.
@“Cardinal Fang”, I am not sure that compressing all those cookies into one week is any better for your health than spreading them out. 
But carry on.
One of my coworkers is engaged to a guy with Russian roots. She baked these, and his mom declared her the ultimate trophy bride!
http://alyonascooking.com/2016/03/oreshki-recipe-walnut-cookies-орешки/
Wow those look so lovely and yummy I bookmarked!
Update to my earlier post - I spent two hours on Saturday morning with one volunteer making the gingerbread dough, band chilling it, then after taking a break for Star Wars with DH, I returned to roll them out, cut, bake, cool, and decorate them. We had 6 volunteers this year, and made 220 gingerbread “people”.
We inevitably have leftover gingerbread dough, which I always made into gingerbread drops - just form 1 inch little balls, then flatten with the bottom of a glass, right on the cookie sheet.
This year, one of the volunteers shared with me a fantastic dessert recipe with gingerbread drops as well as a great use for the casualties - broken legs/arms etc - of the gingerbread people. Toss them all into a gallon ziplock bag, then coarsely crush up the gingerbread crumbs - and use it as a crumble topping for leche flan. I could not believe I had never tried this, as I love the creamy sweetness of leche flan.
I once used leftover gingerbread in a New Year’s Eve Trifle dish, but we decided that we prefer chocolate in the trifle.
I think a crumb topping on leche flan will be the perfect solution to not wasting cookie casualties,