Roll Out Cookies For Santa The Right Way!

Author: Chef Todd Mohr
I'd be worried if I made cookies for Santa and he didn't eat them.  What would that mean?  Was I too naughty this year for him to even take a bite?  Or, is Santa expecting more from me than stale cookies from the store?
Santa expects cookies from scratch and I've let him down in past years.  That would probably explain the amount of coal I've been receiving.
I now know that cookies for Santa should be sugar cookies, and sugar cookies are rolled cookies.  Rolled cookies are great because you use a rolling pin to create a flat dough that you can cut into Christmas trees, hearts or any other shape.  Once you decorate with sprinkles, chocolate chips or colored sugar, you have an attractive holiday cookie.
I'm going to impress Santa this year and try to change his opinion of the crummy cookie offerings I've made in the past.  I'll make some fantastic sugar cookies with a basic dough formula that will rest in the refrigerator for a few hours.
However, the challenge in rolling sugar cookie dough is that you can get inconsistent thickness of the dough.  This means you'll have cookies of different sizes and some will burn while others are under-cooked.
Cookies for Santa should never be burned or under-cooked, so I've developed a great trick to assure the consistent thickness of the cookies I create.
By using wooden dowels or the metal hanging file folder rods, I can give my rolling pin a guide and maximum thickness for the dough automatically.  When I place my thickness guides on either side of the dough, the rolling pin will never fall to a width below that of the guides.
With a uniform thickness of the dough, now I can impress Santa with the many different shapes I can cut them into, the myriad ways to decorate them, but most importantly, the great way they'll bake because of my cooking rolling trick.
This year, my cookies for Santa are going to move me from the "naughty" to the "nice" category and hopefully score me some of the kitchen tools I've been asking for.