Must-Have Baking Ingredients for Holiday Cookie Recipes

There are certain cookie recipes that are staples in a baker's kitchen. Check the freshness and quality of these holiday cookie recipe essentials before baking season begins. Stale or tasteless baking ingredients make for stale and boring holiday cookies. Replace what needs to be replaced, and purchase a few new ingredients to make the best holiday cookies that you can.

Must Have Cheap Baking Ingredients for Holiday Cookie Recipes

White All-Purpose Flour

Replace your bag of white flour from last year with a fresh bag of white all-purpose flour, for the best-tasting cookies on the block. The white flour is not the healthiest flour you can buy, but it does bake quite well. If you want to buy white flour that is a little healthier, purchase the non-bleached version for this year's holiday cookie recipes.

Nothing is worse than cookies made with stale or old flour. Any unopened bag of flour may have a stale scent to it. To keep flour fresh and full of grain moths by placing one large Bay leaf into your flour after it is open. Store unused flour in a canister, marking the date in some way.

If rolled sugar cookies or homemade pie crust are on your holiday baking list, you may consider purchasing two bags of flour. If you make cookies to give as gifts, the second bag of flour will come in handy.

Baking Soda

To all would-be-bakers out there, baking soda and baking powder are not interchangeable. If you mix these up, or just substitute one for the other, you are asking for an unsuccessful holiday cookie recipe.

Purchase three boxes of cheap baking soda. Keep one for baking, and put one in your freezer and one in your refrigerator. The holidays are a good time to add a baking soda box to your refrigerator, because this usually cheap item can usually be found on sale.

Baking soda is essential to many holiday cookie recipes.

Baking Powder

Have you ever had a holiday or other cookie baked with baking soda instead of baking powder? It just does not bake the same, or taste the same. Many tasty recipes for baked goods like sugar cookies require both.

Pure Vanilla Extract

No matter how cheap the imitation vanilla extract is, don't buy it. This is one must-have cookie recipe ingredient for holiday cookies where you need to splurge a little. Pure Vanilla Extract is the truffle of extracts. Imitation vanilla extract is not even a poor baker's doppelganger.

Pure vanilla extract often goes on sale this time of year. It is potent, aromatic, and a must for many holiday cookie recipes.

Real Butter

To make the best-tasting, fluffiest, richest holiday cookies you need to use real butter. Do not buy margarine for this purpose, or unsalted or whipped butter. Buy a pound of real butter, or two.

The advantages to baking holiday cookie recipes with real butter is that although they may have more calories and fat than other cookies, they will also satisfy in fewer bites.

Shortening

Another cheap ingredient for holiday cookie recipes is shortening. Crisco bakes great, but store-brand versions also work. Stick with the plain, not the butter flavored, unless you want your baked holiday cookies to taste like fake popcorn butter.

These are all of the cheap baking essentials you should keep on hand for holiday baking, any time of year.

Author's Note: Pam Gaulin used to bake Santa's favorite M & M cookies for her sister all the time, using a family recipe. She would make her sister clean up the dishes.