For New Year's Day I am going to make my great-grandmother's Christmas cookie recipe. My great-grandmother was from Italian-American, she was born in Italy and came over to America with her parents when she was a small child. She moved out to San Francisco, Ca. to follow her husband, who left her pregnant in Mississippi. Her parents told her she had to go find her husband in San Francisco and put her on a train out to Ca. By the way, this was an arranged marriage, didn't she have the luck! Back to the cookies, you may be thinking these are Italian cookies, but actually, as the story goes.........Great-Nonnie got the recipe from a neighbor who was Armanian. So they are not Italian in orgin at all, but they are not American either. The recipe supposedly came over from Armania with my Great-Nonnie's neighbor. Wherever the recipe came from it is GREAT, and totally reminds me of Christmas and New Years. Great-Nonnie would make a bunch of these cookies and have them at her house for Christmas Eve and she would also give each family a tin of these cookies to take home. Great Nonnie lived to be 104, and made these cookies up until the last few years of her life. I have made this recipe for only two Christmases after her death in 2003. The first time my husband had to come to my rescue and help me after I messed up the recipe and was in tears, after his aid, we managed to get it right (go easy on the amount of flour used when flouring the board and rolling pin. Too much flour messes up the dough). So this will be my third attempt to make these special cookies. Tonight I mixed the dough, so far so good. It came out light and fluffy, it has yeast in the recipe, so it makes the dough springy or fluffy. I put it the fridge, it requires a few hours in the fridge before you roll it out. Tommorrow morning while the parade is on, I will roll ot the dough and put the filling in and bake them. I will let you know how they came out tomorrow. I will also post a picture with the recipe. The best way to descibe them is, they are like a pastry with a yeast taste wrapped around a sweet nut filling, this combination is extremely yummy, you can never just eat one, although they are pretty filling!!!!
