Nana’s Italian Cookie Recipe from Scratch is a Family Favorite
One of our family’s most loved holiday recipes is my Nana’s Italian Cookie Recipe. This fun Cookie Recipe creates the perfect Italian cookies that are so soft and yummy with the perfect amount of sweetness.
Christmas is next week and in my family, that means the oven will be running overtime to get all our baking traditions done. I grew up spending endless hours in the kitchen with my Nana making all her delicious Italian sweets, and now I enjoy teaching my own children how to make these recipes.
The recipe is easy to make, luckily because in my family we are always making a second or third batch before the cookies have even reached the oven. I have so many vivid memories from my childhood of me and my cousins sneaking balls of this dough when my Nana would turn her head, add to that the fact that she was sneaking her own scoops into her mouth when she thought we weren’t looking. As you can imagine we needed to keep extra ingredients on hand if we ever wanted a fully cooked cookie.
Now I laugh as I sneak to the laundry room to hide the dough I’m eating after yelling at my kids to “stop eating the raw dough!”
This recipe calls for 3 1/2 cups of flour and has been nicknamed “The Flour Cookies” by some family members, so as you can imagine picking a good flour and keeping a lot of it on hand during the holidays is very important. Another big ingredient we use in our kitchen is baking soda. Luckily, in the busyness of the holidays, these ingredients are convenient to stock up on in the baking aisle. Each year I grab several bags of Gold Medal Flour and a couple of boxes of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda so that I won’t have to worry about running out during the holiday season.
These are trusted name brands that have been around for over 100 years and are still affordable. My Nana took her cooking and baking very seriously, she always had something baking from scratch, some ravioli’s to cut and lasagna in the freezer in case someone stopped by unannounced. So if these brands were in her cabinets throughout my childhood, I use them and definitely recommend them!
So do you want to make some Yummy Cookies this Christmas?
Nana’s Italian Cookie Recipe
Ingredients you Need to Make these Italian Cookies
3/4 cup butter
1/4 cup shortening
3 Eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 1/2 cups Gold Medal Flour
5 Teaspoons baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup sugar
How to Make Nana’s Italian Cookies
Mix all dry ingredients in one bowl and all wet ingredients in a second bowl. Once both bowls are well mixed, slowly add the dry ingredients into the wet ingredient bowl while mixing.
After about half the dry ingredients are mixed in, the dough will become thicker so I then shut off my mixer and begin to kneed the rest of the dry ingredients into the dough until all the flour is absorbed by the butter.
Grease a cookie sheet and preheat the oven to 375 degrees.
Roll the dough into 1-2 inch balls to bake for 9-10 minutes.
Optional: Once finished baking I drizzle them with a mixture of 1/2 cup of confectioner’s sugar and 2 teaspoons of water.
That’s it, super easy yet incredibly delicious!
