We're counting down to 2025 by sharing some of our favorite cookies on Slog every day in December! by Julianne Bell Mistaken Text Message Vanilla Bean Cookies A Recipe From a Wrong NumberIn December 2021, I received a text message thanking two people named Amy and Laura for cookies. Initially, I shrugged it off as a wrong number. But throughout the week, I continued to receive a flood of texts thanking Amy and Laura for their cookies, including several requests for the recipe. As the texts persisted, I pieced together the clues and deduced that Amy and Laura were a married couple in California who had delivered homemade Christmas cookies to their neighbors, and there had been a typo in Amy’s phone number in the accompanied card, causing all the texts to be misdirected to, well, me. Naturally, I had to know what all the fuss was about, so I eventually asked if I could also have this recipe that seemed to have the entire neighborhood talking. Laura thanked me for being a good sport about the confusion and sent me a picture of a quaint recipe card for “Vanilla Bean Cookies,” a “Kolowith family recipe” that’s “traditionally baked at Christmas.” It turns out the recipe comes from Laura’s great-grandmother—the source is unknown, but it’s been their family’s favorite Christmas cookie recipe for several generations. She warned me the recipe makes a “TON of cookies,” so I might want to halve it or just do what she did and share with neighbors. She also suggested using more powdered sugar than the recipe calls for. I thanked her, and we even ended up exchanging selfies of ourselves with our respective partners. It happened to be snowing, which only added to the holiday magic of the day. This simple, serendipitous encounter just brought me so much queer joy. I’m so used to having to seek out other queer people, but this time, by a twist of fate, they found me. I’ve been wanting to incorporate this famous cookie recipe into my yearly traditions ever since, and this year, I finally decided to make it. Laura wasn’t kidding—it makes a TON of cookies. It calls for no less than a pound of butter and five cups of flour, but was relatively easy to pull together: You cream butter and sugar in a mixer, add flour and an egg, roll the dough out into logs, chill them, slice them, bake, and finally, roll the warm cookies in a mixture of vanilla bean and powdered sugar. The hardest part was shooing my butter fiend of a cat away from the counter several times. To pay it forward, now I’m sharing the recipe with you (with permission, of course!). I also plan to deliver some of the cookies to people in my community who  I appreciate, like my yoga instructors, local library staff, and the striking Starbucks workers. If you make them, I recommend doing what Laura and Amy did and distributing them amongst your neighbors. Who knows—maybe you’ll even spark a new tradition! My tips: 🍪 Make sure your ingredients are all room temperature. I was in a rush, so I used this trick from Sally’s Baking Addiction to quickly soften my butter and placed the egg in a bowl of warm water for 10 minutes. 🍪 The original recipe card doesn’t say when to add the egg, so I mixed it in with the flour after creaming the butter and sugar, which worked out fine. 🍪 I weighed the flour out with a scale (five cups of flour equates to about 600 grams). 🍪 I also used my kitchen scale to divide the dough into two relatively even balls. I rolled these balls into rough logs, then rolled them up with parchment paper and used a bench scraper to smooth them out into neat cylinders. Finally, I twisted the sides tightly to seal them like a candy wrapper (or a giant blunt) before chilling them in the fridge for a few hours. We're counting down to 2025 by sharing some of our favorite cookies on Slog every day in December! Because life is hard, and sugar helps. Will things get weird? Maybe! There may have been a small fire during the first photo shoot! But hopefully, you'll also discover some new favorite treats to enjoy this season. Track our daily recommendations here! 🍪