What are the holidays if not an excuse to eat food?
As is true for most families, my family has a repertoire of recipes that we traditionally make every holiday season. Among our many strange recipes, including eagle-brand milk candy and cornflake wreaths, are our candy cane cookies.
My closest friends will know their appearance by a description coined by a certain Zara Sleet “colored, hardened, dog poop,” but I can assure my readers that they are quite delicious. Until recently, I didn’t know where our recipe had come from. I think that is true of most family recipes — surely someone picked it up somewhere, but over the years, the source of the recipe is lost to legend. These family recipes are often strange time capsules of sorts to cooking conventions of the past. Such are these candy cane cookies.
The recipe originally comes from the 1963 cookbook “Betty Crocker’s Cooky Book”, in which, as you might imagine, Betty gives her recipes for all manner of cookies. Dear Betty, however, isn’t actually a real person, but a character developed by the Washburn-Crosby Company in 1921 to give a more personalized response to customer queries. If a customer wrote in to the company, later merging to become General Mills, one of the women of the Home Service Department would write back under the pen name of Betty Crocker.
Leading the Home Service Department, renamed the Betty Crocker Homemaking Service in 1929, was Marjorie Husted, who transformed Betty into a national titan of home cooking. In 1924, Betty took to the radio waves with “The Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air,” becoming the nation’s first cooking show. Betty (or the person playing Betty, anyways) helped people across the nation become better homecooks and home bakers. Husted voiced Betty for several years, but as the show spread throughout the country, Betty soon acquired many voices, each on a different station across the nation.
During WWII, Betty hosted a show called “Our Nation’s Rations” and distributed a booklet called “Your Share,” both helping home cooks make the most of their rations. From 1949 until 1964, Adelaide Hawley Cumming portrayed Betty Crocker on national TV, teaching the nation how to cook. The painted image of Betty Crocker has changed many times through the ages, but is always intended to be a motherly image. In 1945, Fortune Magazine named Betty Crocker the “second best-known woman in America”, earning her the moniker of the “First Lady of Food”.
By 1930, General Mills had begun publishing cookbooks under the name of Betty Crocker. Perhaps the most famous of these books was the Betty Crocker Picture Cookbook (“Big Red”), published in 1950, a copy of which still sits on a shelf in my kitchen. Throughout the 20th century, with the aid of national scholarships and competitions, Betty evolved to meet changing times. Even today, she is a household name across America, and her red spoon still adorns many General Mills products.
I will not lie; this recipe is weird. For one, unlike most cookies, it contains no leavening agent like baking soda or baking powder. The dough is almost a shortbread, mostly by virtue of the use of confectioners sugar instead of granulated sugar, yielding a cookie with a slightly crumbly, melt in the mouth texture. The only ingredient change I’ve made from the original cookie recipe is the addition of a dash of peppermint extract. Although not strictly necessary, it enhances the candy-cane flavor.
I’ve experimented with adding leavening agent, and the main result is a slightly more airy, but also less chewy cookie. Should you so desire, you may add a half teaspoon of baking power to the flour mixture; it will also make them look slightly better. I also changed the topping mixture; in the original recipe, it is a 1:1 ratio of granulated sugar to crushed candy canes. I figured that, well, what are candy canes but sugar? And if I’m going to have candy cane cookies, they’d better have as much candy cane flavor as possible!
The dough can be a bit annoying to work with if it is too warm, so do make sure that the dough is fridge cold before you begin working with it. The size of the cookies is entirely up to you. My mother makes them very short and fat, while I prefer them to be a bit larger, as is shown in the picture. Even if the cookies are of different size, they generally tend to bake fine together in the same pan.
In my opinion, dear old Betty’s recipe still holds up to this day.
Ingredients:
1 cup (two sticks, or 227 g) butter, at room temperature
1 cup (120 g) confectioners sugar
One egg, at room temperature, cracked
1½ tsp. almond extract
1½ tsp. peppermint extract
1 tsp. vanilla extract
2½ (300 g) cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp. salt
½ tsp. red food coloring
Crushed candy canes, to top
Method:
Cream the butter and the sugar together, either in the bowl of a stand mixer or by hand with a wooden spoon. Add in the egg and the extracts and mix to combine. Whisk the salt and flour together in a small bowl, then add the flour mixture to the butter mixture, stirring to combine. Divide the dough evenly in half. Mix the red food coloring into one half of the dough. Chill the dough for at least one hour.
When you are ready to bake, preheat your oven to 375°. To shape a cookie, roll small spoonfuls of each dough into cords of even thickness, then wind them together to create the striped pattern. Transfer them to an ungreased baking sheet, hooking the top so they look like candy canes. Bake the cookies for about 10 minutes, or until they are slightly browned at the edges.
Immediately remove the cookies to a wire rack and sprinkle the crushed candy canes all over the top of them. Unlike most other cookies, they tend to taste best once fully cooled.
