Happy Hannukah!

I've been enjoying these first few nights of hannukah, and I decided to make some hannukah cookies in honor of the holiday! Wohoo! My roommate gave me some cute cookie cuters shaped like menorahs, dreidels and stars of david so I've been wanting to use them. I looked around for some good cookie recipes, but then I thought, why not make corjiki!! (aka, my grandmother's russian sugar cookies). Now when I was growing up my mother never baked anything like chocolate chip cookies (or chocochip cookies as my mom likes to call them). Instead what we got a lot of were these crispy sugar cookies, which we call corjiki, which come from a recipe my grandmother used to make in Ukraine. Now these are nothing like those anemic pale sugar cookies you find in american stores. These are baked untl they are golden, have a nice crunch to them, and a slight tang from the sour cream used.

I generally avoid asking my mom for recipes. She's a great cook but she doesn't really write down any of her recipes so when she tells me them she generally gives me approximations or tells me to do things by sight (add half a handful of flour, or as much as it looks like you'll need ?!?!)

Anyways here is the basic recipe as she tried to give it to me:


3 egg yolks


3 tablespoons sour cream

1 cup sugar

3 sticks margarine (softened)

½ tsp baking soda & vinegar

2 cups flour (or more)



Mix the yolks & sour cream. In a bowl add the sugar and the flour. Make a small well in the flour and add the baking soda and vinegar. Add yolk/cream mix to flour and mix. Add sthe softened margarine. Add flour to reach dough that is of a soft consistency.

I followed the recipe as she gave it to me but found that my dough was wayyy too soft. I ended up adding a lot more flour, probably 3/4 of a cup.

And of course she didn't give me an exact temperature to bake these at (between 300-350?!) or how long they should be baked (until they look ready). So I decided to go for 350 degrees for about 20 min. Here are my cookies before going into the oven. Look pretty good, huh?

Well here are the cookies after being in the oven for 5 min:

Um, yeah so they just sort of melted and lost their shape. I ended up baking them for 20 min and took them out. They were really soft, so I let them cool and set for a bit. I don't really know why they didn't keep their shape, but my mom never used cookie cutter shapes, she just made them into circles using a glass. They tasted just like I remembered though! And I took the left overs to work where everyone ate them up, and didn't even know any better.