This year’s cookie exchange was full of Christmas cheer and a decent mix of ethnic, traditional and weird cookies – it also came with a head over heels surprise. First, the cookies! I made melomakaronia, a traditional Greek Christmas cookie, the usual sugar cookies and what Good Housekeeping refers to as ‘window pane cookies’. The melomakaronia wasn’t half as difficult as it usually is for me, every time I’ve tried to make them in the past they are hard as hockey pucks – one year we frosted them with black icing and gave them away as coal. This year, however, I learned the trick to them – a trick you’d think my very Greek mother or aunts would have let me in on by now.

My Melomakaronia

The trick is to soak the baked cookies in a mix of boiled honey and water before you sprinkle with ground almonds! Next time I’ll use brown sugar instead of refined sugar and molasses instead of honey, that should make them richer and thicker and you know, Greeker. The window pane cookies were essentially just the usual sugar cookies cut into circles with a smaller design cut out of half of them, jam spread on the solid half and then topped with the other half. They look nice and complicated but they’re super easy.