Recipe: Rolled Animal Cookies

Rolled Animal Cookies
Source: Chicago Tribune annual Food Guide Holiday Cookie Contest December 4, 1986
Makes 48

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 tbsp whipping cream
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp vanilla
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
decorations: colored sugar, raisins, chocolate sprinkles, chocolate chips

Cream butter. Gradually add sugar and cream well. Blend in the egg, cream, baking powder, baking soda, salt and vanilla. Gradually add flour and mix well. Chill dough until firm, several hours (it is hard to roll out otherwise).

Heat oven to 400 degrees.

Roll out dough on a floured board to about 1/8-inch thick. Cut into desired shapes with a flour-dipped cookie cutter. Place on ungreased or lightly greased cookie sheet.

Decorate with colored sugar and chocolate sprinkles and use raisins or chocolate chips for the eyes of the animals.

Bake for 5-7 minutes or until a little brown. Cool on racks. Don't forget to cut the little holes if you wish to hang on the tree.

Note: Dough will keep several days or a week in the refrigerator if you don't get around to cutting right away. I store the cookies in tightly covered tins and they are very good keepers if the children don't find them.

Winner Beverly Bergstrom of Hinsdale recounts making rolled animal cookies: "We called them animal cookies although there were many cutters that were not animals. We would cut small pieces of paper drinking straws and insert them in the top of each cookie and then bake them. The little piece of straw was removed just as the cookies came from the oven, leaving a perfect little hole to put a colored string through so the cookie could be hung on our huge Christmas tree.

"My sister and I would always make sure lots of the cookies were hung around the back of the tree. The tree was in the corner of the living room leaving a space behind, where we could crawl in. A favorite pastime during the holiday season was to lie on the floor behind the tree and using no hands, take tasty bites of the cookies, leaving behind the empty strings decorating the tree. Grandma would always pretend anger when she 'discovered' the empty strings and no cookie. It was a good game."