Grocery shopping guide and easy recipes to get you started with the holiday baking.

I grew up with my dad making homemade Christmas candy every year. He would make the best chocolate fudge and cinnamon hard candy. My mom would always make her whole wheat chocolate chip cookies, a batch of no-bake cookies and a platter of green cornflakes cookies.

Lets just stop right here for a minute and let me tell you about these cornflakes cookies. Basically they are like rice crispy treats minus the rice crispys. Substitute the rice crispys with cornflakes, add green food coloring and there you go. You now know the key to my heart! I could live the whole month of December on this one treat alone. I rarely make these little green monsters because they are so addictive and I am the addict.

Okay back to the whole holiday baking thing……..Nowadays, for me holiday baking begins in October and continues for weeks and weeks with pounds and pounds of sugar, butter and flour. I’m in my last leg of the race this year with just two weeks and about 200 dozen cookies left to go so I made my last bakery shopping trip today.

I know most of you will be baking some family favorites or trying your hand at a new cookie recipe soon so I thought it might be helpful to put a baking essentials list together for you. I hope you find it helpful. These are the basic ingredients you will need for most any Christmas cookie recipe you might stumble across this season.

Holiday Baking Guide

1. All Purpose Flour (not all brands are created equal. My favorites are Gold Medal and White Lilly.)

2. Sugars: white granulated sugar is best for sugar cookies, shortbread, and thumbprint cookies.

Use brown sugar in chocolate chip cookies, molasses or gingersnap cookies.

Powdered sugar is needed for crinkle cookies, thumbprints, snowball cookies, and for making most glazes and frostings.

3. Bakinng Powder

4. Baking Soda

5. Good Vanilla Extract

6. Butter: use REAL butter. I always bake with salted butter, it’s just better y’all.

7. Molasses

8. Corn Syrup: I prefer the dark corn syrup especially for making caramel layers bars and pecan pie.

9. Peanut Butter: quality matters here so buy the good stuff. I always tell people to cook with the kind you like on a basic pb&j sandwich.

10. Cream Cheese: not all brands are created equal here either. I’m sure you can guess which brand I’d recommend.

11. Chocolate Chips: stock up on a variety of kinds. I love adding both semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips to my chocolate chip cookies.

12. Spices: Ginger, Clove, and Cinnamon are the most popular for baking but you may want to garb Cream of Tarter and Nutmeg too!

13. Eggs

14. Be sure to have parchment or wax paper on hand along with cupcakes liners and some clear bags and pretty ribbon for packaging your treats to share!!

Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies

If my mama has a signature baked-good, this would surely be it. She adapted this cookie recipe when I was very young to create a healthier cookie using whole grains. Little did she know that the whole wheat flour would give a nutty, rich flavor to the standard cookie and it would become a staple every Christmas as one of our favorite cookies.

makes 2 dozen

Ingredients

3/4 cup butter

1 ½ cups brown sugar

1 tsp. Vanilla

1 egg plus one egg yolk

½ tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. salt

2 cups whole wheat flour

1 cup chocolate chips

Preparation

Cream butter and brown sugar together.

Add vanilla and eggs and mix well.

Gently mix in baking soda, salt, and wheat flour.

Stir in chocolate chips.

Chill cookie dough in refrigerator for 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and bake cookies 9-11 minutes.

Allow cookies to cool on pan for a few minutes before removing to cooling rack.

Cornflakes Cookies

My all-time favorite Christmas treat, Arrange them in the shape of a wreath on a platter and use red hots to create a pretty red accent. Or be like me and eat them straight from the pan, while standing in your kitchen at 10 o’clock at night in your jammies after everyone else has gone to bed (this way you don’t have to share.)

Ingredients

1 stick butter

12 cups mini marshmallows

1 tsp. vanilla

1 tsp. Green food coloring

12 cups cornflakes

Preparation

Over medium heat melt butter and marshmallows in a large pot. Stir continuously until all the lumps are out.

Remove from heat and stir in vanilla and food coloring.

Stir in all the cornflakes really well until they are completely coated.

Arrange on parchment paper.

Tips

Arrange them is small wreaths or one large wreath on a platter. Add red hots to look like berries and use twizzlers to make a bow.