All-Occasion Sugar Cookie Bars for Tuesdays with Dorie -- and -- Orange Rum Pizzelles for Pizzelle Party Week

Holiday baking is now in full swing! What fun! This week for Tuesdays with Dorie we took a chance with "Grandma’s All-Occasion Sugar Cookies" picked by Ulrike of Küchenlatein -- you can visit her website for the recipe or find it in Dorie's book, Baking From My Home To Yours.

I made these twice, the first time around I had planned to use these as out cut-out Christmastime cookies, complete with frosting and sprinkles and lots of cute shapes. We did a trial run with a few shapes...


and found that they were really difficult to roll out, even after chilling. Totally impossible to roll, cut, and transfer to a baking sheet, so I tried to roll them out on the cookie sheet and then pull the excess dough up around them and just bake the shapes. Didn't really work out that well. So for the rest of the dough I figured I'd do the 'roll and slice' method -- then continue with the frosting and sprinkles, for the kids. Here they are after baking, we taste tested one and they taste nice but are not the kind of cookies I imagined they'd be. I love thick, soft, chewy sugar cookies and these were more dense, crunchy sugar cookies. We didn't end up frosting them, but between my husband and the kids this small batch of cookies lasted barely more than a day -- yikes! I would call these more 'butter cookies' than 'sugar cookies' -- almost like a shortbread.


Which brings me to my second batch of these cookies -- I hadn't had a chance to try my new 12 Days Of Christmas shortbread pan (by Chicago Metallic), and thought these would be perfect to give it a go. The recipe as written made just enough to fit into the pan, but the shapes didn't turn out too well, probably because I had a tough time smooshing the cookie dough down in there...



Good news is that the pan performed beautifully and released the cookies with no problem. I can't wait to try this pan again with an actual shortbread recipe :)



What I ended up with were sugar cookie bars and they ended up being amazing! Go figure -- we thought these turned out much better than the cookies from the same dough. The only change I made to the recipe the second time around was to add a whole second egg, rather than just a second egg yolk.

Aren't the delicious looking?

That's all for TWD this week, but I do have another cookie to share, yesterday I started Pizzelle Party Week here at Nummy Kitchen, and today I have a recipe for...

Orange Rum Pizzelles

3 eggs

2 cups all purpose flour

1 cup sugar

2 teaspoons baking powder

2 teaspoons rum

2 teaspoons grated orange peel

1/2 cup melted and cooled butter

Juice of one orange -- about 1/4 cup

Sift together flour and baking powder in small bowl. In medium bowl whisk together eggs and sugar. Add cooled melted butter, rum, orange juice and zest. Slowly whisk in flour. Drop by tablespoons onto pizzelle iron and bake for about 30 seconds -- depending on your pizzelle maker.

Love that orange zest!

The pizzelle maker I'm sharing today is a Salton Holiday Pizzelle maker from the late 1990s. It makes two pizzelles at a time and each has two different holiday designs, a santa face and a Christmas tree, and holly berries and a deer. The pizzelle designs are also available on a pizzelle maker made by Windmere, they are the exact same plates on the inside, but the Windmere pizzelle press is white and the Salton model is black.

Yes, that's Jimmy Buffett's Christmas Island CD off to the left side :) My husband loves to laugh at me as I dance around the house to Christmas music from October - January. Sometimes I have to break out a Christmas CD in July because I miss the holidays but don't tell anyone.

Happy Holiday Baking!