With the trend toward local, fresh ingredients, nothing makes an old-fashioned holiday feel more traditional than plain cookies made with Daisy Flour, milled in our 250-year old flouring mill in Annville PA.   Here are some stories about our favorite cookie recipes with links to instructions for baking them yourself.

For Americana traditions, nothing says old-fashioned Christmas Cookie more than the golden, paper-thin  Sand Tart.  Any rolled pastry is easier to handle when made with Daisy Pastry Flour. Even so, it takes patience to roll this dough evenly so we’ve included several tips for the novice cook along with the recipe.  While they are in the oven, watch them carefully for they are easily burned.  THIS is the ultimate recipe in team cooking.

Peppernuts are also a very plain, plump sugar cookie, well known for their milky white sweetness among the Germanic Lancaster County natives. Two recipes, each  about 100 years old, were baked  with local Daisy flour during the years 1890 until 1985 when the flour went off the market for about 20 years. Mary Werner’s Peppernuts  are the “crown jewel cookie of our clan” according to her daughters, who still live near the family farm south of Lancaster City.

As children, they walked across the field to Thomas’ Butcher Shop to get lard* for their mother’s peppernuts. On Fridays, Mother (Mary Werner) baked Cookies for Saturday, Market Day at the Fulton Market. Beginning at 4 a.m. on Saturday, the cookies were packed in boxes and large baskets. She would walk to the trolley stop, take the trolley into Lancaster and then transfer to the 6th Ward trolley to get to the Fulton Market.  All this travel while carrying cookies and pies..the Peppernuts -- priced at 18 cents a dozen--always sold out on market day.

Browse through our RECIPES tab and look under Cookies  to find more of our seasonal favorites. Chewy dark-brown Hermits full of rich raisins and nuts add richness to a plate of these simple oldstyle cookies.  Plain Jane Sugar Cookies are good for decorating in any season because they hold their shape when rolled;  if you want more of an old-fashioned crunchy cookie,  drop teaspoonsful of the Plain Jane batter onto your greased cookie sheet and dust the top with ginger or perhaps a crushed peppermint cane.

*Lard. We get a lot of feedback about the fats in our Recipes and we find it easy to go to the Central Market and ask the butcher for lard or the dairy farmer for fresh butter, especially when experimenting with pie crusts.  All-butter and Daisy Flour is too rich and too plastic. Hydrogenated fats do the trick (half and half) but it’s hard to justify mixing such a highly processed food substitute into our totally and 100% organic flour. Lard – just plain lard – is too strong for delicate pastry. If you have used leaf lard, please send your comments to us for a future blog on lard and its modern cousins to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Please send us your favorite recipes to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it