Food Network's 12 Days of Cookies: 2002

Last year, it frustrated me when the cookies featured in the (I thought) inaugural 2003 edition of the 12 Days of Cookies were demoted to pictureless status on the round-up page (I also found it frustrating that the current year's cookies weren't listed, but that's another story). The 12 Days of Cookies newsletter has become a part of holiday tradition for me, and you can't have a tradition without history.

This year, though! This year!

This year, the 2003 cookies -- including my annual favorite, the Almond Snowballs -- disappeared from the round-up page completely!

The travesty! Scrooges! Grinches!

I decided that I had to preserve this tradition myself, since Food Network seems to believe that recipes degrade with age, like leftovers, rather than improve, like fine wines.

Despite this negative attitude, all of the recipes from 12 Days past still exist in the Food Network online database. With a bit of searching on Google, I uncovered the lists from years past -- I even discovered that a list from before 2003 existed!

And here is that list, from 2002 by my estimate. The page I found from an older version of the Food Network web site doesn't give a date for the holiday season it covers. There's a copyright from 2001 at the bottom, but there's a notice about 2003's edition being a newsletter instead of a web page, so I'm guessing that implies this list is from the year prior.

Most of the recipes are courtesy of Gale Gand, a Chicago pastry chef who used to have an afternoon show on the network called Sweet Dreams. Food Network doesn't give enough airtime to baking or sweets, in my opinion. No one's ever going to learn to create desserts from Ace of Cakes.

I'm going to link to each recipe on the Food Network site from here. Unfortunately, the links on that old page don't work anymore, so I had to search for each recipe on the current site. That means I can't be 100%, super-duper-positively certain that I selected the recipes that correspond to the list, as some titles had multiple matches. However, I'm pretty sure I deduced the correct recipes using the years listed and the pictures, which all look similar in style.

Food Network's 12 Days of Cookies, 2002

• Day One: Ruth Moulton's Spice Balls
• Day Two: Pecan Dreams
• Day Three: Coconut Macaroons
• Day Four: Lydia's Austrian Raspberry Shortbread
• Day Five: Pizzelle: Thin Waffle Cookies
• Day Six: Old Fashioned Sugar Cookies
• Day Seven: Dried Cherry and Chocolate Biscotti
• Day Eight: Honey Oatmeal Cookies
• Day Nine: Chocolate Peanut Butter Thumbprint Cookies
• Day Ten: Holiday Rum Balls
• Day Eleven: Lollipop Cookies
• Day Twelve: Macadamia Nut Brittle

For anyone out there who uses MacGourmet to store their recipes, I've also created a compilation of all twelve 2002 holiday cookie recipes.

Download 12 Days of Cookies 2002 into MacGourmet.