I can’t believe Christmas is in a matter of days. This is the first year I have not been stressed with holiday shopping and baking. Rather than saving all the baking and cooking for the last minute, I relied on my freezer to stagger the process over the past two weeks.

Each shelf in my freezer houses a different cookie confection ready to assemble into cute little country boxes, as I peck away at my list of teachers, bus drivers, co-workers and family who are worth all the time and effort that baking from scratch comes with. I started by making various doughs and refrigerated them shaped as round disks wrapped in plastic wrap. I made sweet crusts for Walnut Tassies, dough for Ina’s Jam Thumbprints, Onion Rugelah cream cheese dough, as well as peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough, and gingerbread people dough.

When, I had a spare hour or two, I preheated the oven and baked away. I am often asked what my baking tools of the trade are, and I have several that make this time of year easier. The first is my Kitchen Aid Mixer. I own the standard model and it is perfect for my needs. Rather than upgrading to a 6 quart version, I find it less expensive to simply buy an extra stainless steel bowl from the manufacturer. This way, I can have a batch of cookies going, with a second bowl prepped and ready to mix. My second appliance is a good roomy food processor. To save time, I pre-grind walnuts or pecans that I know I will use in recipes within the week. Then I just store the ground nuts in Ziploc baggies for whenever. I also grind oats into homemade oat flour. You can even create almond flour with finely ground almonds.

A digital scale is another great kitchen investment. To ensure even cooking times, I weigh my cookie dough to be sure all the cookies are uniform in size. A typical cookie is a half ounce. Larger cookies are one ounce cookies. If you are making mini pies in mini muffin pans, a half ounce of dough is the perfect amount. Weighing and measuring the dough also makes it possible to get a full yield on your cookie amounts.

Flat cookie sheets are my favorite. I don’t buy nonstick cookie sheets. I simply line all my cookie sheets with parchment paper and nothing will ever stick to the pan again. Parchment paper will start to brown if oven temperatures reach four hundred degrees or higher. You will want to discard it after this happens. When placing dough on parchment paper, you do not need to pre-grease the paper or coat it with anything. As I said, nothing sticks to it. It also makes for easy cleanup. I reuse the sheets of parchment for the next batch of cookies going in after the pan has cooled. I use my great grandmother’s old rolling pin. It is mustard yellow, wooden and I love it.

A stainless steel pastry cutter is a great tool. It is great at scraping dough off your work surfaces, scraping your rolling pin clean, or cutting balls of dough into equal portions. I am also a big fan of wooden tart tampers. A tart tamper is a small wooden dowel that pushes a ball of dough into a mini muffin tin causing the dough to equally line the bottom and sides of the tin with dough. It forms the perfect indentations for fillings such as mini quiche or pecan pies.

I also only use unsalted butter for my baking. The difference in taste is unbelievable and you can have more control over the flavor of the cookie. When freezing cookies, be sure to freeze them flat. Once they are fully frozen, carefully place them in Ziploc freezer bags and lay them flat in the freezer. To create two tiers of cookies per Ziploc bag, place a paper plate in the Ziploc bag and arrange cookies on it.

Place a second paper plate over the first layer of cookies and fill up the second plate with cookies. When defrosting cookies, defrost them overnight at room temperature. One last bit of advice. Nowadays, with all of the nut allergies, be sure to let your recipients aware of any nuts you may have used in your baking. People with allergies will really appreciate it.

Happy Holidays!