Take four professional bakers and four keen home bakers and challenge them to bring their best holiday cookie recipe to the table. The results – as you might imagine – were delicious.
Nothing captures the child-like wonder of the holidays more than cookies—iced, spiced, sparkled, spangled. For TABLE’s very first celebration of these baked jewels, we chose the stately great room of the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum as our backdrop. Four professional bakers — Nicole Appels, Celina Grife, Molly Eyler Mix, and Chainé Peña — and four home bakers — Marti Mills, Alexander Murph, Dale Rice, and Richard Stangarone — took on our challenge of creating dozens of a favorite festive holiday cookie.
We delighted in beautiful stacks of New Mexico’s beloved bizcochitos, classic sugar cookie cut-outs, gingerbread-inspired confections, cookies with their roots in Italy and South Africa, and French macarons with a touch of local blue corn. Marcel Remellieux, the owner and head chef of Santa Fe’s wildly popular Mille French bakery, helped me pick this season’s best in our pro and amateur categories.
Guests at the event, including a couple of very discerning elementary school students, also voted on a People’s Choice award. We independently came to the same pair of conclusions, with the top choice being Chainé Specialty Cookie Shop owner Chainé Peña’s stunning macarons. Also named winning cookie was home baker Alexander Murph’s molasses-and-ginger enriched hermit cups, with their lemony centers and little caps of mascarpone cream. Honestly though, all these cookies are worthy of praise, and it’s our bakers’ pleasure to share their recipes with you as a holiday gift.
Holiday Cookie Recipes from New Mexico Bakers
Crackly Sugar Cookies by Molly Eyler Mix
Bakery Feliz owner, Molly Eyler Mix, grew up baking from a very young age. She would sneak into her closet at night and bake cakes in her Easy-Bake oven. Fortunately, the light bulb that fueled the pint-size ovens in those days didn’t burn down the house. She went on to get a degree in food science and dietetics and baking jobs in the mountains of Colorado, where the food science degree came in handy when cooking at 10,500 feet.
She later had a business making wedding cakes, which she offers at her Santa Fe shop, along with other cakes, multiple varieties of cookies, and many other sweet treats. Molly suggests rolling these holiday favorites in sanding sugar or themed sprinkles to mark any occasion year-round. The dough can be frozen for up to four months. Many tasters commented on the chewy crackly texture of these charmers.
Mom’s Iced Christmas Sugar Cookies by Dale Rice
Dale Rice’s grandmother, Winifred Frazer, initially made this cookie back in the late 1920s. By the 1940s, the recipe had been handed down to Dale’s mom, Winifred Frazer. When Dale was about six, he was allowed to ice them, delighting in the colored frosting and glittery sugars. By the time he was in his teens, he had begun “stirring them up,” as his mother would call it. This former journalist and journalism professor — with a stint as food columnist for the Austin American-Statesman — has continued to make them every Christmas season since.
Italian Lemon Ricotta Cookies by Richard Stangarone
Richard Stangarone has cooked since he was a youngster, under the watchful eye of his Italian grandmother, but he didn’t start baking in earnest until he moved to Santa Fe 25 years ago. He was always surrounded by good Italian cooking. The original version of this cookie caught his eye, though, just a few years ago, and he’s been perfecting it ever since. All who sampled the cookie commented on its bright burst of lemon, as well as its colorful coating of sprinkles.
Bisco-Chai-tos by Marti Mills
Passionate home baker Marti Mills grew up eating her great-grandmother Harriet’s biscochitos each holiday season. They would start whipping them up right after Thanksgiving and continue making them by the dozens through New Year’s. It was Harriet that began the family tradition of hand-cutting them in the shape of a flor de izote, or yucca flower, continued by Marti today, and especially appreciated by all our cookie tasters. Marti has made one change to the traditional cookies though, flavoring them with chai spices rather than the more expected anise. Marti suggests adding some of the chai spice mixture to a cup of tea to sip while nibbling the bisco-chai-tos.
Hermit Cups by Alexander Murph
Alexander Murph balances the highly technical work he does as a consultant at Los Alamos National Laboratory with the creative energy of baking. He came up with this “Best” — as awarded by the judges as well as by our “people” — of the home bakers’ cookies with his original mash-up of gingerbread and hermit bars. He credits Ina Garten, Sally’s Baking Addiction, and Urban Bakes with recipes that inspired his lovely little creations, molasses- and spice-rich cookies filled with lemon curd, and topped with mascarpone cream. Murph, as he’s known to all, comments that the downside of his recipe is that “There’s a lot of waiting around, while the upside of it is that everything keeps very well in the fridge, so you can do many of these steps in any order, then compile things whenever you’re ready.”
Biscochitos by Celina Grife
Native New Mexican Celina Grife had a bustling 15-year real estate career in Albuquerque and was making her Grandmother Maggie’s biscochito recipe for her clients each holiday season. When the housing market collapsed in 2008, Celina started selling the anise-scented cookies to supplement her diminished income. The biscochito business became such a sensation that she never returned to real estate. One of our event’s tasters aptly called these “sheer perfection.” If you wish to duplicate that ethereal quality, Celina stresses that you can use no other other than lard. She used a Zia stamp to decorate her cookies. If you don’t want to make her recipe yourself, the luscious morsels are sold at select outlets around Albuquerque and Santa Fe and can be ordered from celinasbiscochitos.com. She and her team whip up a variety of flavored versions during the Christmas holidays, along with the classic New Mexico state cookie style.
Peppermint Crisp Sugar Cookies by Nicole Appels
Nicole Appels immigrated to the US from her native South Africa after getting a culinary degree in pastry. She has worked with Auberge Resorts as a pastry chef as well as been a partner in a Santa Fe bake shop. By the time, you read this, she hopes to have opened her new project, Mzanzi Mana, offering South African meals and desserts. The cookie she devised for our holiday celebration is a variation on a popular South African tart. Our cookie tasters loved the peppermint flavor and crunch. The tennis biscuits called for are a popular South African snack, a bit like graham crackers with coconut flavoring. These and peppermint crisp candy bars are online at amazon.com and other online sources.
Blue Corn Macarons by Chainé Peña
Chainé Peña, a sixth generation Santa Fean, has loved baking since she was a kid. She began posting images of cakes and cookies she had made for fun on social media. Initially, she was surprised when people started asking her if they could order her creations. In 2016, to accommodate the requests, she got her catering license through Albuquerque’s community commercial kitchen, The Mixing Bowl, because Santa Fe didn’t yet have a facility for her to use.
Her fascination with macarons came, as you might guess, from travels to France. She has greatly expanded, though, on the classic repertoire with flavors like these blue corn beauties. As an added fillip, Chainé topped them with teeny sugar paste red chile ristras. Macarons are fairly finnicky. While in other recipes, we have generally given weights and measures, here it is truly essential to measure the ingredients in grams to get the desired result. Follow Chainé’s directions exactly.
Story by Cheryl Alters Jamison / Photography by Tira Howard / Styling by Julia Platt Leonard / Location Courtesy of Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum
Subscribe to TABLE‘s print edition