my 2024 christmas cookie box
on vegan turrónes and questionable cookie cutters
Visions of sugarplums Christmas cookie boxes have been dancing through my head. And Instagram feed. And on TikTok. And on Substack. I am obsessed with them.
They are exactly what they sound like — a box of cookies, often ones people give as gifts to loved ones. Justine Doiron does one. Someone I follow on TikTok named Elise is making one. The New York Times releases a set each year. I really like the idea of curating your perfect box, making sure you have a good balance of flavors, textures, and shapes. I like baking, experimenting, and variety, and a cookie box checks all those, well, boxes. I’m obsessed, to say the least.
What is unfortunate about this obsessions is that 1) I live in Spain and make a less-than-liveable wage which I cannot afford to throw away on lots of cookie ingredients, 2) I live in Spain and don’t have a ton of friends I can gift random boxes of cookies too, and 3) I live in Spain and have one cookie sheet, a small oven, and one mixing bowl to my name. Also I share my kitchen with two people and work most of the week. Plus I had no real reason to make like nine different types of cookies and pawn them off to my friends. So making a real cookie box was probably not in my immediate future. AND THEN. And then, our friend Gaia invited us to a cookie swap. And my visions intensified. I began planning and drooling slightly, and all of a sudden I was making five different types of cookies.
So after much toiling and almost crying and flinging clumps of butter and sugar around the kitchen, I present to you my 2024 Spanish Cookie Box.
The Birthday Cookie
My birthday is December 21st which I lamented as a child for all the reasons you’d suspect — It’s too cold for fun outdoor birthday party activities, we’re always on winter break so I never got to celebrate with friends, and most importantly, I have to share my birthday with baby Jesus AND my twin sister?!?!?!
It only makes sense, then, that my holiday cookie box would include something in honor of me. I am a sucker for a classic sheet cake, but sheet cakes are finicky and I hate waiting for them to cool before frosting them, so a birthday cake cookie is the perfect solution. These were definitely the easiest cookie in the box in theory EXCEPT I had to convert all of the units from cups to grams because we only have a food scale, and either I did something VERY wrong or this recipe was just a little off.
These cookies spread and melted like crazy in the oven and came out kind of oily. I baked the first batch a couple weeks ago for an early birthday celebration and ended up freezing the rest — the second time around, I kept them nice and cold and cooked them for less time, and they fared much better.
The Family Cookie
When I think of Christmas cookies, I think of Aunt Ellie. She makes at least three or four types every year, which is three (or four) more than we usually make at home. I mostly remember the bright green Christmas trees, the frosted sugar cookies, the soft-baked pumpkin cookies, sometimes the round ones covered with powdered sugar. She keeps them in great big tins with little pieces of bread heels so that they don’t go stale as fast . Her mother, my Nanny, used to make 30 different kinds of cookies — almond bars, ricotta balls, shortbreads, brownies.
I stuck with the easiest recipe in the batch Aunt Ellie sent me: the Scotch shortbread. It’s basically just butter and flour mixed together, cut into nice shapes, and baked.
I did not have cookie cutters.
Luckily I used the internet, which told me it was “very easy” to make a cookie cutter out of a soda can. After cutting my thumb open on a Pepsi Max can, I did manage to create… something. But other than that minor bloody snafu, the actual process for these cookies was quite easy, and I have to say they turned out really tasty — perfectly baked, very nice and crumbly, and not too sweet at all.
The Spanish Cookie
This, of course, would not be a cookie box in Spain without a Spanish cookie! Now the Spaniards actually aren’t that in to baking (surprise surprise) and especially not during the holidays — traditional Christmas treats are usually purchased at the store. The most popular are polvorones and mantecados, a type of crumbly, almost sandy cookie made with lard. Polvorones are a little drier and usually contain almonds, and mantecados are baked with more fat and typically sprinkled with cinnamon. Turrones are a type of nougat, traditionally made with honey, sugar, egg whites and toasted almonds, though now there are varieties with chocolate, pistachio, dried fruits, and other nuts.
Now I should mention that Gaia requested some of our cookies be vegan to accomodate some dietary restrictions at the cookie swap. Why am I mentioning this here, when I’ve just listed treats whose main ingredients are LARD and HONEY and EGG WHITES? Because I am crazy and decided that the Spanish cookie must also be vegan. Now it turns out there aren’t a lot of vegan nougat or lard cookie recipes out there, but I found one that seemed promising from a Barcelona baker.
This was not a small undertaking. I blanched and peeled like a million almonds by hand. I ground them in very small batches in our tiny food-processor-slash-hand-mixer-immersion-blender. I added maple syrup and agave and expensive cane sugar little by little until I had the right texture, and then I packed it into a container and let it sit. And sit. And sit. And then I unveiled a… turrón? These did not really resemble the texture I had hoped for (a little too grainy) but they tasted quite nice, sweet and spiced and nutty.
The Traditional Cookie (but it’s also vegan)
I also believe that no cookie box is complete without a classic spiced cookie. I love gingerbread, but I saw a TikTok somewhere for these glorious looking spiced apple gingersnaps and I felt called to them. I found a vegan version online and whipped up the batter fairly easily — I did NOT want to spend an arm and a leg on whole wheat flour, so I just used regular all-purpose, and they don’t have pumpkin spice seasoning here so I substituted a little nutmeg.
I also substituted the vague “vegan butter” for margarine, since they don’t really do blocks or sticks of vegan butter here. I also think something got messed up with the measurements here or the texture of the margarine because this dough was… thin. Like basically cake batter. I test baked one cookie and it basically flattened into a pancake, so I went back to the drawing board (Google) and ended up adding like half a cup of flour to the batter and chilling it.
Luckily, the dough held together much better after that, and I was able to actually roll the cookies as instructed and press the apples down. I can wholeheartedly recommend these if you’re looking for a vegan apple cookie 👍👍👍
The Not-a-Cookie Cookie
Ok, yes, technically turrones are not cookies, but I also felt this cookie box needed a little something different. And that something different was another grandma recipe — spiced brownies. These looked easy enough except for that the only boxed brownie mix I could find was a definitely expired box of Halloween brownies from Aldi.
The instructions on the back of this box were WILDLY different from the recipe here, but I followed it faithfully and ended up with a batter just slightlyyyy thicker than the traditional brownie batter I’m used to (I had to cut the recipe in half and substitute chocolate syrup for actual melted chocolate, so that may have contributed something).
Anyway these actually turned out great — a little on the cakey side but the spices added so much to them. I don’t think I can go back to regular brownies. Plus I used the weird Halloween icing that came in the box to decorate these with snowflakes so I was feeling GREAT.
So yes, I showed up to the cookie exchange with five different cookies, and yes, I had the time of my life. Highlights at the exchange for me included:
A matcha-white-chocolate cookie that actually tasted so strongly of matcha which is a hard feat!!
A double-chocolate cookie which had the most amazing perfect fluffy texture… still thinking about her
White-chocolate Biscoff truffles. I don’t think I have to say more.
The girl who brought an entire giant greek yogurt container full of real Hidden Valley ranch dressing dip
Entering a fugue state at the end of the night and decorating a million sugar cookies
I hope you all get to enjoy a holiday treat with loved ones this season! Saludos to being resourceful in the kitchen and more vegan butter than I know what to do with <3
I love this diary entry!! It sounds like being delirious at 1am was well worth it.
And hey . . . we usually made ONE kind of cookie every year. I remember sticky fingers trying to wrap chocolate cookie dough around a rolo. And white floors covered in powdered sugar after making a batch of pecan balls.