My wife, Carrie, and I tend to get bored with the traditional shapes of holiday cookies, all those stars and trees and reindeer and stuff. A couple of Christmases ago, we decided to make our own shapes. It was sort of a dare to see if we could create one so gross that no one would eat it. The task was way too easy.

Say hello to the booger cookie and the anatomically correct Bigfoot (partially cut off at the right).

Now it’s your turn: Create your own gross-out holiday cookie and send it to me at tcarman@washingtoncitypaper.com. I’ll post the pictures on the Young & Hungry blog. The winner will get some sort of gift, as soon as I can find one.

As I wrote about last week, my friend Lou Cantolupo had tried to use me (and this precious piece of food-writing real estate known as the Young & Hungry column) for his own purposes, namely to win an office-party cookie contest. Of course, even after I contacted the esteemed Michel Richard to hunt down holiday cookie recipes, Lou rejected the celebrity chef’s offerings as too pedestrian. He also rejected my idea of turning Richard’s Ginger Graham Cookies into holiday s’mores, by taking a pair of those cookies and pressing them down on a gooey mess of melted dark chocolate and marshmallows dyed green and red.

Instead, Lou devised his own recipe, a sort of twist on the classic peanut-butter cookie topped with Hershey’s Kisses. It’s an ingenious recipe that, as you might expect, did indeed win Lou the office cookie contest. As the humble winner wrote via e-mail: “I now hope that you all too will enjoy the pleasures that these little delicacies of happiness brought to my own palate and ever expanding gut.”

The full recipe is after the jump.

Read More “The New Generation of Hershey’s Kisses Cookies for the Holidays” »

My friend Lou is a terrific home cook, particularly with desserts. Get a load of his red-wine poached pears—the treat that was almost too gorgeous to eat. (Almost.) As you can see from that one example, Lou doesn’t take shortcuts, even when it comes to a cookie-baking contest for a holiday office party. The dude really wants to win.

Lou e-mailed me yesterday, saying that it “might be an interesting column” if I’d ask “big shot chefs/pastry chefs in town to divulge or come up with their great Christmas cookie recipe.” Little did I know that Lou was working me for his own ends. I found that out this morning when I called him on the way to work, informing him that the Post had just devoted its Food Section to holiday cookies. None of the paper’s recipes, he thought, would win him the office-party bake-off.

He wanted something more fanciful. He wanted something more elaborate. He wanted something from Michel Richard. I reluctantly agreed to contact the city’s master chef for a recipe. By day’s end, Richard’s PR coordinator Mel Davis e-mailed me a couple of cookie recipes (you can see them below the jump). I forward the recipes to Lou for review. His response:

They “look like fantastic cookies but they’re just cookies. I need something that’s gonna wow ‘em. Any thoughts on what I could fill them with (a la sandwich cookies) that’s holidayish?”

Tough crowd.

Read More “Michel Richard Cookies for the Holidays: Not Good Enough?” »