French Toast Cookies

December. Christmas season. Year three. The tree is up (Mason decorated the bottom, Lily added three ornaments and quit, I did the rest). The house smells like pine and cinnamon and the particular anticipation that belongs to December — the waiting-for-something feeling that children experience as magic and adults experience as credit card bills.

This year, the kids are with me for Christmas. The alternating schedule gives me the odd years: 2017 was Scott's (the gas station Christmas), 2018 is mine. I will have my children on Christmas morning, in my house, opening presents by the tree, and the simple normalcy of that — the thing that most families take for granted — feels like a gift so precious that I can barely hold it.

Christmas baking has begun. Sugar cookies (shapes: star, tree, horse, dinosaur — one for each child). Gingerbread. Fudge (new this year — Jen's recipe, dark chocolate with sea salt). And cinnamon rolls for the freezer, because Christmas morning without Diane's cinnamon rolls is not Christmas morning. I'm training Mason on the cinnamon roll recipe — not just helping, but learning. I showed him the card in the Ziploc bag, Diane's handwriting, the flour stain on the corner. I said, "This is the most important recipe in our family." He held it like a sacred text. He is seven. He understands that some things are more than what they appear to be.

Lily is in the school Christmas play. She's playing a sheep. Not a lead role, but Lily is performing it with the commitment of a Shakespearean actor — she has memorized her one line ("Baa!"), practiced it two hundred times, and informed me that she is "the best sheep in the play." I do not doubt this. I do not doubt anything Lily says about her own abilities, because she is usually right and always convinced.

I made the fudge — Jen's recipe. Dark chocolate, condensed milk, butter, sea salt. Melted, poured, chilled, cut into squares. It is obscenely rich and not at all ranch food and Diane would love it, even though she'd say, "Where's the peanut butter?" because in Diane's world, fudge without peanut butter is just confused chocolate. But it's good. It's new. And new recipes are still arriving in my kitchen, one at a time, from friends and books and the internet and the beautiful expanding world of a woman who is done with surgeries and ready for everything else.

That last batch of fudge reminded me that new recipes are allowed to belong — that not everything in the Christmas kitchen has to come from a Ziploc bag with someone else’s handwriting on it. So when I stumbled on French Toast Cookies, I thought: yes. Cinnamon, warmth, the smell of something good in the oven, a cookie that tastes like a slow December morning. Mason helped with these too, and I didn’t have to tell him they were special — he already knew, because anything made in this kitchen in December is special by default.

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 12 min | Total Time: 32 min | Servings: 36 cookies

Ingredients

2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, softened
3/4 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
2 large eggs
2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 teaspoon maple syrup
1/4 cup powdered sugar, for dusting

Instructions

Preheat. Heat your oven to 375°F. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.
Mix dry ingredients. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, and nutmeg until evenly combined.
Cream butter and sugars. In a large bowl, beat the softened butter with both sugars on medium speed until light and fluffy, about 3 minutes.
Add wet ingredients. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the vanilla extract and maple syrup. Mix until smooth.
Combine. Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, stirring just until a soft dough forms. Do not overmix.
Portion and bake. Drop rounded tablespoons of dough onto the prepared baking sheets, spacing about 2 inches apart. Bake for 10–12 minutes, until the edges are set and the centers look just barely done.
Cool and dust. Let cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring to a wire rack. Once cool, dust lightly with powdered sugar.

Nutrition (per serving)

French Toast Cookies — The Kind of New Recipe That Earns a Spot on the Christmas Baking List