Mime’s Sand Tart Recipe: My Family’s Christmas Tradition

Decorated Sand Tarts in Christmas Tins

Decorated Sand Tarts in Christmas Tins

Part of what makes the holidays special are the family traditions, things you look forward to all year long. Many families enjoy making Christmas cookies and have a cherished cookie recipe that has been handed down from generation to generation. Every year, my family makes sand tarts—thin and crispy butter cookies decorated with colored sugar or cinnamon-sugar. These festive cookies are always a hit and never last long.

My great-great grandmother, who everyone called Mime, would begin making sand tarts right after Thanksgiving. Making sand tarts is a labor of love, especially when making a large batch of cookies to share with family and friends. You have to roll out very thin sheets of dough to cut the cookies. You need the dough just soft enough to roll it, but still hard enough to get it to the necessary thinness. This takes time and is quite the arm workout after a while, but the results are worth the effort. read more

Halloween Chocolate Sprinkle Cookies + Bleeding Candle

Halloween Chocolate Sprinkle Cookies with Bleeding Candle and Spiders

Halloween Chocolate Sprinkle Cookies with Bleeding Candle and Spiders

I love Halloween—it’s my favorite holiday! I’m always excited when October comes around and I can start making scary Halloween treats, like my blood-splattered cookies or these jagged glass cupcakes.

Halloween Chocolate Sprinkle Cookies

This Halloween on Flavorful Journeys I wanted to feature a dessert that isn’t as macabre as in years past (don’t worry if you like the dark side of Halloween as much as I do—I’ve also included instructions for making the bleeding candle pictured above). So I made Halloween chocolate sprinkle cookies with dark chocolate Hershey’s kisses. read more

Pepero South Korean Snack – Pepero Day

Pepero South Korean Snack

Pepero—a popular South Korean Snack manufactured by Lotte Confectionary

I thought it would be fun to do a snack series on Flavorful Journeys, where I feature different snacks from around the world and discuss their history and cultural significance. After all, who doesn’t like snacks, right? In today’s busy world, we don’t always have time to sit down and eat three meals a day; sometimes snacks play a critical role in tiding us over until our next meal and getting us through a long, hectic day. read more

Blood-Splattered Cookies

Blood-Splattered Cookies

Blood-splattered cookies are a deliciously morbid Halloween treat. They’re also wickedly fun to make. These blood-splattered cookies are a mash-up of Jackson Pollock and Dexter–Pollock’s ingenuity plus Dexter’s insanity equal disturbingly beautiful Halloween cookies.

These blood-splattered cookies are somewhat labor-intensive, but the dramatic results of slinging icing like a madwoman definitely make them worthwhile.

  • Start off with round cookies of your choosing

I made a combination of chocolate and sugar cookies. Allow the cookies to cool completely before applying the icing. read more

Colored Dough Decorative Cookies

Colored Dough Decorative Cookies, Christmas cookies

I love Christmas and I love all the delicious sweets that surround the holiday. Hot cocoa, apple cider, sugar cookies, eggnog, gingerbread men, candy canes, sandtarts, etc. One of my favorite parts of Christmas is making Christmas cookies. This year I learned a revolutionary technique, at least revolutionary for me! Instead of using icing or sprinkles to decorate your cookies, create decorative patterns using colored dough. Such a marvelous concept. It takes you back to your playdough days, where you roll out snakes and balls. For once, you can encourage your kids to play with their food! Take this simple recipe for dough and let your imagination go wild. This recipe can apply to all holidays and themes, just change the cookie cutter shapes and dye the dough whatever color you want. Voilà! Instant hit. read more