Medicine Hat, Alberta

Just do the 1/2 cup sugar...definitely. I add about a 1/2 tsp. of cinnamon and a dash of nutmeg. One more thing, I use scalded milk instead of boiling water. Yummmy...oh, and for the grown-ups, add some peppermint schnapps!

I love these cookies! I've been making them with my Christmas cookies for the past few years. One complaint I have is that the serving seems to be off, I got about 60 cookies out of the recipe instead of 22. Instead of refridgerating the dough, I put it in the freezer 30 minutes. Then I roll out the dough and put it on a cookie sheet, and then put the cookie sheet in the freezer for an additional 10 minutes. This seems to stop the cookies from spreading in the oven. I keep the bowl of dough in the fridge between batches as well. The cookies only needed 9 minutes to cook in my oven. Also, in previous years I had trouble crushing the candy cane. One year I tried a hammer (lol) and ended up with more candy cane on the floor than on the cookies. Another year, I tried the blender and I couldn't get the pieces fine enough. They also clumped up really bad even though my blender was perfectly dry. This year I found the PERFECT device! I used my coffee grinder, and it got the candy cane super fine - just how I like it. I coat the entire top of the cookie with the candy cane to help with the blandness.

These were great and very simple to make! I coated mine with icing sugar.. quite festive :) Reminded me of snowballs. The only thing I had trouble with is that the dough wouldn't stick together at first for me. But I just popped the mixture into the deep-freeze for 30 minutes and all was well!