Chanukah Traditions

The Jewish holidays are always a time for cooking and baking yummy foods. One of my favorite Chanukah foods are sugar cookies. You are correct, you can have cookies on any holiday, but on Chanukah they are a special tradition for me.

Typically, the one time of the year I use margarine in baking is for making sugar cookies for Chanukah. I love making Chanukah-themed cookie shapes and glazing them with a simple powdered sugar-based glaze. I always had difficulty finding the perfect proportions of oil, flour, sugar, and other ingredients to make dough that has a good consistency for making shapes with cookie cutters without using margarine. Until this year.

This Sunday I wanted to make sugar cookies. I had forgotten to purchase margarine at the supermarket last week, and I had no intention to take the cold trip out again. So, as any determined person will do, I asked my sister-in-law if she had a margarine-less sugar cookie recipe. And in fact she did! The recipe did require some tweaking. I used less oil than it called for, and added some extra flour and sugar. Once they were baked, I realized I should have used less baking powder, because sugar cookies are not supposed to grow or get a little bubbly like these did.

I wish I could share the recipe with you…and the other people who have already asked for it. But, sadly, I did not measure my ingredients! I plan to remake the cookies, but this time measure the oil, flour, and sugar that I use. On the agenda in a coming week is to give you the margarine-less sugar cookie recipe. 

Before Glaze

After Glaze!!