One smart cookie

Christmas is sugar-cookie time, so get out the mixing bowl, the rolling pin, the cookie cutters, the cookie sheets, the decorator tips, the sprinkles and colored sugars.

With all of today's options, you can make everything from scratch — doing all the mixing, rolling, cutting and baking yourself. Or you can take some shortcuts with dough mixes — refrigerated or frozen — and already baked cookies just waiting to be decorated.

You can mix up your own icing with powdered sugar and food coloring or buy ready-made frosting tubes. It just depends on the amount of time you have and how much you want to spend, since ready-made cookies and frosting often cost more.

The striking drama of black-and-white cookies stands out amid the usual bright jumble of Christmas colors. And a bouquet is a fun way to display your creations.

"If you can get the rolling and cutting thing down, that's the first hard part," said Mary Jarvis of Bakers C & C, who demonstrated how to make a black-and-white cookie bouquet at the Utah Chocolate Show last month.

"The second hard part is the decorating part, but you can have a lot of fun with it. And one thing to remember, you don't want them to look too perfect or people won't believe you made them. They'll think you bought them."

Jarvis uses a brownielike cookie recipe for the bouquet, which hold their shape because they contain no leavening and very little fat. If you want to use the light-colored sugar cookies for bouquet-making, find a recipe where the cookies won't spread during baking, she advised.

Some tips for mixing and making these cookies:

• Make sure there are no lumps in the brown sugar before you add it, because there's not enough moisture to dissolve the lumps during mixing, and you will end up with lumps in your cookies.

• Jarvis advocates using a Dutch-processed cocoa, which is processed with an alkalizing agent to give it a milder, less bitter flavor. She also uses a smaller amount of dark cocoa powder to give the dough a darker color.

• She places the dough between two sheets of parchment paper to roll the dough out without tearing it. (This is also a great tip for making pie dough.)

• In order to get an even, 1/4-inch thickness on her dough, she places two wood strips that are 1/4-inch thick, on either side of the dough. They look similar to wooden rulers. "I just roll the dough on them and can tell how thick the dough is. They have a commercial product called 'perfection strips,' but you can just go out in your garage and make your own."

• After cutting the desired shapes, place thick wooden skewers on the back of the cookies and reinforce the skewer by placing a small layer of dough over the back of the stick.