Author Notes

I didn’t grow up in a very "decorated cookie" household. My mom hewed more to the biscotti/gingerbread/shortbread crunchy cookie end of the spectrum, and the year I tried to do festively decorated cookies in my own home, I ended up with royal icing in my hair and sprinkles in my floorboards for a week. I took on this fussy baking project in an attempt to impress at a school holiday party. It was my first time trying to border and flood reindeer-shaped gingerbread cookies with contrasting icing hues and dragée eyes, and also my last.



That said, my mom has been making rosemary shortbread cookies during the holidays for about as long as I can recall. I remember having the cookies in the apartment I grew up in on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and I remember having them after Thanksgiving dinner in the dining room of the apartment where my parents moved after I graduated from college. I know my mom has brought me a box of this shortbread when she's arrived at our annual Christmas Day open house, because she knows my older son loves them.



When I put all these several occasions together, it’s clear we’ve been eating these cookies for at least 25 years. Because they freeze so well, my mom often bakes them off in quadruple batches and sends her Christmas Eve guests home with their own stash to store.



I’ve always loved how savory they are, and in my version of her recipe, I added grapefruit zest, increased the salt in the dough, and topped them with a salt-and-sugar mixture that adds a little crunch. Shortbread is about the least fussy dough a person could have to tackle—for this one you don’t even have to roll out and cut, you just smoosh everything into a baking pan and bake. I still managed to get crumbs on the floor when I took them out of the pan for serving, but that’s maybe just a “me” thing. —lallimusic

Test Kitchen Notes

Featured in: Food52's Holiday Cookie Chronicles —The Editors