Cookies are a timeless and well-loved dessert by many. The best part about baking cookies is that there’s so many variations, recipes, and memories with each batch you make. There’s a cookie out there for everyone - chocolate chip, sugar cookies, cookies with nuts, cookies with icing - you name it! With this cookbook, you can make some of the best cookies around that will beg everyone for more at your next family gathering, party, or date night! 

Jenny has done her research on making the best sugar cookies around with lots of experimenting. If you are going to write an entire cookbook based on cookies alone, they better be THAT good - and trust me, they are. The first recipe in this cookbook is “Jenny’s Cookies”; I followed her recipe word by word to make a large assortment of star-shaped cookies in the recipe below, and took a nibble out of the baked leftover dough with my siblings. One bite and we fell in love. It’s satisfying, slightly sweet, with a melt-in-your-mouth goodness. These cookies are the foundation to creating your own recipe with your own personal embellishments.

For this recipe, I created O Christmas Tree, and that took baking cookies to a whole new level. This is the perfect winter and holiday recipe, because the cookies are actually shaped like pine trees. This batch requires her signature cookie dough with a bit of green food coloring, and a small amount of buttercream to stack them together. It’s a perfect decoration amongst a potluck, and they’re almost too cute to eat!

Jenny Keller suggests adding green gel food coloring to the dough before baking to give it a more realistic look. In my experience with this recipe, her suggestion for 2 drops of food coloring did not give it that pine tree effect I was going for. After 6-8 drops, I was finally able to achieve the perfect green marbling on my dough without completely turning it green. 

Like all good things, baking cookies do take time. I started this recipe at 8pm to make the cookies from scratch, leaving lots of time for them to stay in the fridge for easy cutting. One pro-top: leave the dough in longer than 10 minutes, otherwise they tend to stick your counter at room temperature. I ended up finishing this recipe around 12am since I baked the cookies one sheet at a time.

Once the initial sugar cookies are baked and cooled completely, I followed Jenny’s buttercream recipe (note to others: I only did one third of the recipe and it was still too much for these cookies). Each cookie had a dab of buttercream so they can be stacked without falling apart. For the smallest star, I “glued” it upright to resemble a Christmas tree. With the cookies were all stacked together, behold, you have unique pine trees based on the amount of star shapes you own! For O Christmas Tree, I had 7 different shapes of stars to make the trees. 

Overall, these cookies look as good as they taste. I made 4 trees with about 8-12 cookies on each one. Top off your cookies with powdered sugar and you’ll find yourself in a winter wonderland! 

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