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Show DANISH CHECKERBOARD HEARTS 2 eggs 3/4 cup sugar 2 1/2 cups flour 2 1/3 teaspoons baking powder 3/4 cup softened butter, salted 1 egg white Beat the eggs and sugar until creamy, then stiff. Mix flour and baking powder together, and add to the eggs and sugar, alternating with the butter. Remove half of the dough from mixing bowl and set aside. Put several drops of red food paste into the dough in the bowl and mix until the color is evenly dispersed. Roll the red dough and the plain dough out separately. Using a knife, cut half of the heart out to weave: Weave strands, and be patient. The first one will be tricky. Brush with egg white and decorate with pearl sugar, if desired. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes, or until slightly golden around the edges. Makes 18 woven hearts or 2 dozen cookies. This dough comes together in a matter of minutes, has zero chill time (not that you would need it, with the temperatures stubbornly sitting in the teens), and like any sugar cookie, can be cut and decorated however you wish. SUGAR COOKIES 1 1/2 cup sugar 1 cup butter 4 eggs 2 teaspoons vanilla extract 4 1/2 cups flour 2 teaspoons cream of tartar 1 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon salt Chill for one hour. Roll and cut out. Bake at 350 for 8 to 10 minutes. ROYAL ICING (FOR TOADSTOOLS) 1 pound powdered sugar 5 tablespoons meringue powder about 1/4 cup water, or more if stiff splash almond extract Mix until completely smooth. Divide icing and dye half of it with red food paste. Paint tops of mushrooms with red icing. When dry, add spots and stem with white icing. Cream Cheese Icing 1/2 cup butter 8 ounces cream cheese 4 cups powdered sugar 1 tablespoon almond extract milk as needed Mix until smooth. BY ANNA DRYSDALE /ASST. NEWS EDITOR a.drysdale@chronicle.utah.edu 've heard that most people feel like the holidays are coming when they see turkeys in the meat department and Christmas tree lots on the side of the road. But I know they're coming when the windows at home steam up around the edges. I live in a house that was built in the 1920s. On the coldest winter mornings, I wake up to swirling snowflake patterns on my windows, like something out of "Little House on the Prairie." There is a hot radiator in the corner of each room, where my brothers and I used to hang up our snow suits after building snowmen, where we tuck our ski boots to warm the night before heading off to the mountains. When leaves start tumbling to the ground and winter winds start, we start checking the windows, waiting for the day that it will be cold enough for a hazy mist to spread across the windows from the warmth of the kitchen. One day, sometime before or after Thanksgiving — we never know quite which to expect — clouds of steam gather on the windows as we cook, and the coziest part of the year begins. Heat from the kitchen glows through the house whenever the stove or oven is on and steam swirls off of soup on the way to the table. Over the next few months, there are days that we bake just to watch the windows steam — when there is no party to go to and no neighbor gifts left to deliver. We bake, or cook, just for the windows — to make our house like my Grandma's old pink house in Providence, Utah where the windows steamed each Thanksgiving, from the heat of the turkey, stuffing, sauerkraut, Parker House rolls, pie, and the entire family crammed into one house. The windows steamed late this year, past 11 p.m. on a late Thanksgiving. By 9 a.m. that Saturday, the whole house smelled like cinnamon and cloves — we were baking gingerbread houses. Since then, my mom and I have spent late nights and entire afternoons in the kitchen, listening to old Christmas music and rolling out dough. We've made old favorites — almond tarts, and gingerbread houses, but I think I'm most excited about our two new sugar cookie variations: toadstool sugar cookies and Danish checkerboard hearts. Sugar cookies are like watercolor paintings for me. It seems like I always have a perfect vision of how they will turn out all colorful and neat. Then they never look like that — until this year. Both of these cookies are based off of European Christmas decorations, and they turned out exactly the way we hoped. The checkerboard cookie uses a Norwegian dough that is softer and more buttery than most sugar cookies. For as long as I can remember, my mom has sprinkled them with cinnamon and pearl sugar. We used our standard sugar cookie recipe for the mushrooms, with a almond-flavored royal icing. I used to eat stacks of these, slathered in cream cheese frosting, with my friend Lauryn. m PHOTOS BY ANNA DRYSDALE |