COOKIES!! plus ways to make any outfit festive

so into that #50

Hi!! Yesterday I got home from the final stop of my What to Cook cookbook tour and wow, it’s bittersweet. I had the absolute best time meeting so many of you face to face after years of DMing and commenting back and forth. The collective kindness, enthusiasm, wit, and intelligence of this community is truly spectacular.

After all that travel, I’m excited to hunker down at home in Carmel Valley for the holidays.

It’s cookie baking week across America. My DMs have exploded with cookie-related questions over the last three days, Molly is prepping for a cookie exchange party this Friday, and I plan to bake up a storm with the boys this weekend.

Many of you have messaged to ask me for the Christmas Monster Cookie recipe I shared a few years ago on Instagram, which is a festive spin on the Coronado Cookies from my first cookbook, Just Married. I re-shared the reel earlier this week, but also know a lot of you like to print out recipes, so I’m sharing it here with a PDF, too. Find it at the bottom of this post!

Envision these (because I somehow have no pic!) but with Christmas-colored M&Ms!

I love making cookies for my neighbors, kids’ teachers, friends, mailman, etc. I box them in these and tie them off with some pretty ribbon. My friend Dan has an amazing guide to gifting holiday cookies and he’s selling these adorable cookie tins! I aim to try a new cookie recipe every year if time allows, and here are a few I’ve bookmarked to make one day.

cookies by (left to right) Broma Bakery, Susan Spungen, and Anne Byrn

1. Yesterday my friend Sarah, AKA Broma Bakery, shared this recipe for Soft Gingerbread Cookies and dang they look good. I want to make them with the boys immediately.

2. Susan Spungen is the queen of cookie season here on Substack. Her Cashew Cardamom Rugelach Buns look so, so good and would be perfect for Hanukkah gifting or celebrating!

3. Anne Byrn — another Substack cookie queen who quite literally wrote the book on American cookies — shared a post with two cookie recipes yesterday: Dee’s Cheese Date Cookies (Dee was her grandmother!) and Crescent Cookies (Anne says they’re similar to Mexican wedding cookies, which I’m obsessed with!). In the post, she perfectly puts into words why holiday cookies are so special:

“What I learned when writing the book, American Cookie, was that cookies are expressions of love, small squares of a nostalgic place in time, stains in a beloved old family cookbook, remembrances of cookie jars and a childhood past, little dots connecting the holidays in our lives. Cookies are timeless, precious, and remind us of people dear.” –Anne Byrn

Is there a certain cookie that reminds you of “cookie jars and a childhood past”?

cookies by (left to right) Dan Pelosi, Sally’s Baking Recipes, and me!

4. How perfect are these Peppermint Candy Cane Cookies from Dan?

5. This is my fave sugar cookie cutout recipe!

6. And here’s one I make all the time: my Ooey Gooey Brown Butter Rice Krispie Treats — Christmas tree style!

Well my number one tip for this would obviously be WHO HAIR. But aside from that, here’s how we plan to dress up any and all outfits for the rest of the month.

1. Bright lipstick. I love literally all of Merit’s lipstick colors, but Vermillion is my fave for holiday season.

2. Fun shoes. Molly’s been wearing her Rothy’s flats in lollipop red nonstop.

3. Big shiny earrings. I just added these to cart!

First, we can’t not debrief after last week’s Christmas movie matrix. We’ve already decided that next year we need to start researching for V2 of the matrix in August, and that there should be a separate kid-friendly movie matrix too for claymations, HP #1, Charlie Brown, etc. There are also apparently some good-good movies that somehow weren’t even on my radar?! The Night Before and Klaus are top on my need-to-watch list this week thanks to your recs. And maybe just maybe I’ll give the muppet Christmas Carol another shot due to the sheer outrage of it being excluded from the list.

We loved reading through the pitches for movies we missed in the comments section, and thank you to everyone who shared special stories about your favorite ornaments. We used a random number generator and congrats goes to Erin C., who’s the winner of the Cuisinart food processor! Erin, we’ll DM you through Substack to coordinate delivery.

For a fun giveaway this week, we’ll be donating $100 to one paid subscriber’s nonprofit/organization of choice! To enter to win¹, comment on this post. Tell us about your favorite non-profit and why you love giving to them. We’ll announce the randomly selected winner in next week’s So Into That. Mine is the Navy SEAL Foundation, they support Gold Star families by sending the kids of fallen SEALs to college, summer camp, therapy, paying for funerals, they help SEALs find employment after retiring from the teams, they pay for grad school, the list goes on!

As a reminder, you can gift paid subscriptions to What to Cook the newsletter and schedule them to land in a person’s inbox on a certain day!! Click here for a gift card that you can print and wrap up or stick in a stocking.

What to Cook launched in December 2020, which means there are more than 200 recipes in the archives. To help you cook through them, let’s revisit what we cooked this week last year, and the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that.

1. harissa bolognese spaghetti squash, 2023

This is like a one-pan bolognese lasagna but with veggies in place of noodles. The addition of harissa puts it over the top!

2. one-pot cheesy baked meatballs, 2022

If classic comfort food is more your speed this week, these delicious and versatile meatballs are where it’s at. Use whatever ground meat you’ve got. Serve them over noodles or straight out of the skillet with a loaf of crusty bread. SO GOOD.

3. one-pan roast chicken and squash, 2021

This was WTC’s first whole-chicken sheet-pan meal, and guys, it’s so good. As you roast the perfectly spiced chicken, you’ll also roast an acorn squash, then turn it into a mashed potato-ish side infused with goat cheese. This would be a lovely impressive meal to cook sometime over the holidays.

4. cheesy shells alla sausage vodka, 2020

Later this week, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking will turn FOUR! This was the first official WTC recipe (!!!) and would be so fun and delicious for us all to revisit this week.

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Makes about 20 cookies

Tools:

• 2 sheet pans

• Parchment paper

• Stand mixer fixed with paddle attachment

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup unsalted butter (1 stick), room temperature and cut into small chunks

• 1/2 cup smooth peanut butter (or any other nut/seed butter)

• 1/2 cup white granulated sugar

• 1/2 cup firmly packed light brown sugar

• 1 large egg

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 1 cup all-purpose flour

• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda

• 1/2 teaspoon salt

• 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate baking chunks

• 1/2 cup mini M&Ms (try to find Christmas colors!)

• 1 cup Rice Krispies Cereal

• 1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats

• Optional: 1/2 cup yellow raisins

Preheat oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper.

Add 1/2 cup room-temperature unsalted butter (that you’ve cut into small chunks), 1/2 cup smooth peanut butter, 1/2 cut white granulated sugar, and 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar to the bowl of a stand mixer fixed with the paddle attachment. Beat on high until creamed (it will be fluffy and smooth), about 4 to 6 minutes. Scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed.

Add 1 large egg and 1 teaspoon vanilla extract and continue beating until smooth.

Reduce mixer speed to low and gradually incorporate 1 cup all-purpose flour, 1/2 teaspoon baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Once fully incorporated, mix in 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate baking chunks, 1/2 cup mini M&Ms, 1 cup Rice Krispies Cereal, 1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats, and 1/2 cup raisins (if using).

Turn the mixer off immediately once all ingredients are mixed in (over mixing your dough will make the cookies tough!). Use a 1 tablespoon scoop to drop the dough 2 inches apart on the prepared baking sheets. Leaving space between the cookies is important, they will spread as they bake!

Bake for 8 to 10 minutes, or until the edges have lightly browned but the tops are still very blonde. (This is very important!! The tops should look like they aren’t quite cooked yet! They’ll firm up as they cool, I promise!)

BANG the sheet pan firmly on the countertop 5 times to flatten the cookies out a bit. Allow the cookies to cool on the baking sheet.

christmas monster cookies

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NOTE: Yes, you can make these without a stand mixer, either using a hand mixer or by hand! Just make sure your butter is super soft and that you whip the butter and sugar together really well.

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