The Holiday Cookie Guide

Cookie Recipes and How I Store and Pack My Cookies

Hello Friends,

Many years ago (when I first started my blog), I naively participated in an online cookie exchange. The premise seemed simple; I’d bake my favorite cookies, pack, and ship them off. Here’s where I went wrong; I looked at the previous years’ cookie exchanges after signing up. I about died! Everyone’s cookies looked like they’d come straight out of a Martha Stewart or glossy food magazine. The sugar icing on the cookies was perfectly drawn out, the color scheme choices were like a Farrow and Ball catalog for cookies, and my professional experience as a cook at the time could be measured on a quarter of my thumb.

Terror quickly took over. I quickly learned that cookie exchanges could be competitive (even though they’re not supposed to be a contest). Doubts and questions crept in. How would I pack the cookies in a way that kept them fresh and undamaged (after all, they’re pieces of art in the creator’s mind), and would my cookie box look as nice as everyone else’s? What did I get myself into?

I had three weeks to prepare, which wasn’t enough time to practice. I knew it would be foolish to compete with the marvelous look of cutout cookies that were ornately decorated with brightly colored icings. Some of the participants already had custom packaging created for their cookies. I decided it might be best to go simple and skip the frosting design Olympics. I wished I could get out of the entire thing.

I opted for drop cookies. They’re simple and usually need no frosting; they need to look like circles. I could manage that. My next problem was a little more complicated. How to package and ship the cookies and ensure they still tasted fresh by the time they arrived in the recipient’s hands. This is where I failed miserably. I’d chosen paper boxes to pack the cookies and shipped them inside the standard mailbox cardboard containers. Two packages were damaged in the hustle and bustle of mailing. Against my better judgment, I packed the cookies in paper bags, and some of them turned stale, and others broke during shipping. After my big cookie debacle, I hid in shame for a few weeks, but the sun always rises the next day. Though I never participated in another cookie exchange, I learned how to pack my cookies and improve my frosting skills.

Cookie storage is a battle between nature and humankind; nature always wins. Our goal is to delay that win.