Oh! My! Good! Ness!

I am swooning - absolutely SWOONING - over the Old-Fashioned Christmas Butter Cookies. 

From start to finish these are a hoot. The recipe calls for 3 hard-cooked egg yolks. In a cookie. Who's ever heard of such a thing? 

You press the yolks through a fine sieve and get the strangest velvety stuff that evidently works magic in cookie dough. You also add three raw yolks. That's a lot of egg yolks by any measure. 

The recipe gives you a choice of adding the zest of half a lemon or 2 teaspoons brandy. I opted for lemon zest but will try the grown-up version next time. And believe you me, there will be many, many next times for these goodies. 

The dough chills pretty firm but rolls out without too much work or crumbly mess. Even at 1/16" (yes, I measured) the dough holds its shape well enough to transfer easily to a cookie sheet. 

On baking, these cookies hold their cut shape beautifully. The cookies pictured above were made with William Sonoma's Circus Cookie Cutters which are not, contrary to their advertised promise, kid-friendly and easy to use. 

I've tried these crazy cutters on several cookie doughs and failed every single time. The dough sticks in the delicate animal limbs of the cutters. The decorative impressions are too shallow or deep. The cookies inflate on baking and you lose the animal detail. But they worked on this dough like a charm. A charm from Tiffany's. Did I say swooning already?

On to taste. And texture. Deliciously buttery. And deliciously flaky. And 100% awesomely yummy. They taste old-fashioned by today's standards, but they earned that title in December 1947!  These taste like love coming out of a warm oven with a tall glass of milk chaser. 

If I weren't professionally committed to copyright law I would type out the entire recipe right here right, now because you have got to make these yourself and share the love. 

Here's the final kicker, and if you've read old posts you know how I love this detail. The last sentence of the instructions read "...bake in a moderate oven... removing each cooky as it is ready." I love, love, LOVE cooky instead of cookie. I might start using it myself.