Raisin Cookies

Cranberry cookies, a twist on the raisin cookies.

This is yet another classic cookie from my mom’s Christmas baking. It seems all are, well, maybe not. This one I had to tweak a bit because…drum roll…I don’t like raisins. *gasp* There! I said it! A lot of people don’t understand that but I can’t help it. I like grapes, I do. But dry them and I run away, screaming. So what does a girl do? She substitutes, which is fairly easy in North America because you have dried cranberries. So, instead of raisin cookies you actually see cranberry cookies. The basic recipe though is with raisin.

I am not sure if you have noticed by now, but a lot of those Christmas cookies from German require arm strength. Most of them require kneading and if you make like 2 or 3 doughs a day you’ll feel it. On the flip side you don’t need to go to the gym.

Ingredients:

– 200g flour
– 125g butter
– 125g raisin
– 2 yolk
– 125g sugar
– 4g vanilla sugar (1/2 a package) or 1/2 tsp. vanilla
– pinch of salt
– rum

Mix all ingredients well and knead into a nice ball of dough. Then take a spoon and cut off pieces to make the cookies. You don’t want this to be a ball or nice and uniform. Those cookies do not spread very much and you kind of want them look lumpy. Bake at 180°C for about 10 min.

Cut off some dough to make these cookies.

Tip 1: The rum is sort of important. It gives the whole thing a nice flavour. Either you soak your raisins a bit, which will enhance the flavour or you just knead it right in. Just make sure you have a good rum with about 40% of alcohol.

Before baking your cookies should look somewhat like this.

Tip 2: As I said previously, you can use other dried berries or fruit. I used cranberries and cherries, both are dark so it goes well with the rum. I imagine you can also use apricots or light dried fruit but you might want to cut back on the rum.

Those are the cherry cookies, yummy!

Tip 3: Cranberries and cherries tend to be a bit bigger than you average raisin. I would suggest you chop them somewhat so that you don’t have monster fruit in you little cookies.