This is the same recipe that my grandma made for years--I can still see her in the kitchen cutting up the gumdrops with her scissors. One helpful hint is to keep the sugar handy to dip your scissors in when they get too sticky. I've tried freezing the gumdrops and using the food processor but that doesn't work very well and was extremely noisy!! This is a very tasty "fruit"cake--not what traditionally is thought of as a fruit cake. I hope you decide to try this one and I'm pretty sure that you'll enjoy this piece of our family's Christmas tradition too! Thanks for sharing the recipe, Glenda=-)

Reviewed On: Dec. 3, 2009

If you cannot find baker's ammonia (hartshorn) locally you can purchase it through the King Arthur Flour website (kingarthurflour.com). It does make a difference especially in the crispness of the cookies it is used in and worth trying to find as the other review has said. Yummy!

Reviewed On: Dec. 3, 2009

This was a very easy cookie to make with my new Pampered Chef Cookie Press. I got almost 5 dozen cookies from this recipe using the Christmas tree disc. I didn't have any oranges, so I used granulated lemon peel that I reconstituted in the vanilla extract. I added green food coloring to my dough, but didn't remember that I wanted to until after I had added the dry ingredients--my cookies had some air bubbles in them which I am attributing to mixing too much after adding the dry ingredients. **I would strongly recommend adding food coloring when you're creaming the butter & cream cheese** I also used margarine, which is OK but I'm sure that real butter would make these taste even better! I'm not sure that the citrus adds a lot to these cookies, but that may be because I didn't have the fresh orange zest. I added some holly quints to some of the trees and they really look like finished, special cookies-- even better than the red sugar ones.

Reviewed On: Nov. 30, 2009