It’s the night of Dec. 24 and you’re running around your kitchen trying to finish the perfect plate of Christmas cookies for your family.
You planned on recreating a gingerbread recipe you saw on TikTok, complete with elaborate icing decorations and bright smiling faces.
Unfortunately, we’re not all Martha Stewart.
In reality, our perfect Christmas cookies either turn out too brown around the edges with a thick cloud of black smoke following them out of the oven or we’re scraping them off the pan due to the under-baked middle. The icing decorations look more like a puddle of colors melding with each other and those bright smiling faces are more like a frown.
Now we’re scrambling to fix our mistakes before the big man in red comes to town and no one wants to resort to the tin of premade cookies that we know will sit in our pantries gathering dust.
Cookies are a crucial part of the holiday season and you deserve to serve sugar cookies that’ll bring tears of joy to anyone who takes a bite.
Step up your cookie game with the help of Senovia Quihuis-Garcia, the baker behind Novia’s Bakery, who shared with us her tips and tricks to ensure your treats taste and look good.
Quihuis-Garcia has always had a passion for baking, teaching herself how to create delicious baked goods. She even landed a couple of restaurant and pastry chef jobs, including a stint at the now-closed B Line.
She later switched things up and found herself at a corporate marketing job, but grew tired of it. Instead of sitting behind a computer, she decided to quit and was inspired to start her own bakery from home. Thus, Novia’s Bakery was born.
Senovia Quihuis-Garcia first started her home bakery, Novia’s Bakery, three years ago.
At different markets and local coffee shops around town, you can find Quihuis-Garcia’s soft, flavorful cookies, including favorites like her vibrant sprinkle cookies, her homemade oatmeal crème pies and her cochitos, her pig-shaped spice cookies.
“I really want to pay homage to the Mexican pastries and bakeries that I grew up with,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “I pull a lot of inspiration from there, and then also just like childhood favorites like Little Debbie snacks or things I would buy at the supermarket.”
This year, she’s pulling out all the stops for her Christmas cookies. Red velvet snickerdoodles, Mexican gingerbread cookies, sprinkle cookies, double chocolate chip peppermint cookies and ginger snaps are just a few of the holiday-inspired items you can find on her menu.
While Quihuis-Garcia is mixing together unique ingredients and turning out the cutest snowman- and ornament-shaped cookies you’ve ever seen, that may be way too advanced for some of us.
If you’ve only used premade dough in the past and are looking to challenge yourself this year by making holiday cookies from scratch, Quihuis-Garcia recommends starting with something easy like a sugar cookie or a classic chocolate chip cookie.
“They're going to taste good even if you burn them a bit, they're still really crunchy,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “Those are the best because you can decorate them with icing and sprinkles, so it's more of an activity on top of it being a dessert. I would say even a chocolate chip would be easy too, it's the same thing but with chocolate chips.”
If you want to get real fancy with your chocolate chip cookies, you can sprinkle a little bit of sea salt on top for some added flavor.
You also may be tempted to throw all the ingredients in one bowl and mix them together, but that is something you want to avoid. Quihuis-Garcia said she first whips together the butters and sugars, creaming them together so you get air in. Then, you’ll want to add your liquids such as eggs, vanilla extract, milk and any other similar ingredients. Lastly, you can slowly add in all your dry ingredients like flour, cocoa powder, baking powder, baking soda and salt.
If you’re not using pre-sifted flour, Quihuis-Garcia suggested you make sure to sift before adding it into your dough, that way you’re not overworking your dough to get those clumps out.
Once your dough is ready, it’s time to get them on the pan. It’s hard to get each ball of dough perfectly symmetrical every time; sometimes you end up with really small cookies and other times you end up with one massive cookie that won’t bake all the way through.
Red velvet snickerdoodles, Mexican gingerbread cookies, sprinkle cookies, double chocolate chip peppermint cookies and ginger snaps are just a few of holiday-inspired items you can find on Novia’s Bakery’s menu.
To combat this, Quihuis-Garcia says to use an ice cream scooper or a spoon to ensure your cookies all stay the same size.
“If you don't have a kitchen scale, what I would recommend is just get an ice cream scooper, or just use the same spoon and try and get all of your doughs roughly the same looking size,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “That way when they bake, they all spread about the same and they'll all be roughly the same size too.”
Now onto the tricky part: baking. It can be hard to determine whether your cookies are underdone or ready to be taken out. You may put them back in for two minutes to get a little more golden and instead you’ll be pulling out a tray of black cookies.
This can all be avoided with a few easy tips. First, Quihuis-Garcia says you want to make sure your oven is preheated to the temperature the recipe states. Then, you want to let your oven stay at that temperature for about 20 minutes before you put your cookies in. That way, the oven has time to really get to one temperature and, in turn, your cookies will bake evenly.
“You can have the best butter, the best chocolate, the best vanilla extract, all that, but if you burn your cookies or if they're still raw, then it doesn't really matter,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “I would say, take time and focus on perfectly baking your cookies.”
To make sure your cookies are evenly baked all the way through, Quihuis-Garcia likes to check on her cookies halfway through the baking time. She then rotates the pan and lets them continue baking. Once she sees a nice golden color develop around the edges, she knows they are ready to be taken out.
“Once you start seeing any color on the edges, or, like, a golden color, that’s when I'm saying, OK, these are pretty much done, because once you take them out of the oven, they will keep cooking,” Quihuis-Garcia said. “You want them to almost look a little bit under-done, or not quite there when you're taking them out of the oven, because once they set on the counter, they're going to be totally fine.”
And just like that, you did it! You survived the cookie baking process and ended up with round, fluffy, soft cookies. All you have to do now is decorate them to your heart's content and anxiously wait for a friend to take a bite.
