Key to baking cookies is keeping it simple

To Trish Karter, holiday cookie baking should be one thing, above all else: simple.

That might sound strange coming from the chief executive and cofounder of Dancing Deer Baking Co., which from its Roxbury factory turns out 100,000 cookies a day with such flavors as molasses clove, sugar cane lime, and cherry almond ginger. But Karter is also a 49-year-old single mother of two, and after a long day or week at work, the last thing she wants to undertake is a complicated project.

With the height of the holiday baking season approaching, Karter takes a minimalist's approach, starting with the choice of cookie dough. Rather than plan a gift box that includes everything from macaroons to snickerdoodles to brownies, each needing to be made separately from scratch, Karter starts with just two doughs, one vanilla and one chocolate, based on the same shortbread recipe.

Each can be the basis of several varieties: Knead dried cranberries and pumpkin seeds or pistachios into one, add chocolate chips and crystallized ginger to another. Cut some into holiday shapes, such as stars or snowmen, and dust with coarse sugar. Leave others round but frost them with a simple sugar icing.

Best of all, since shortbread dough takes well to freezing, either before or after baking, the cookies conform to the baker's schedule.

''This is where my own 80/20 rule comes in," says Karter, who lives in Milton. ''You can get 80 percent of your results with just 20 percent of the effort."

When it comes to equipment, Karter is similarly bare bones. The factory has a line of ovens taller than she is, Hobart mixers capable of handling a mountain of dough, and even an airbrush for stenciling color onto cookies. But for home cooks, she suggests only a few basic purchases: a solid rolling pin, a bench scraper for lifting dough and cleaning up, cookie cutters, strong baking sheets, and a frosting knife.

She uses parchment paper rather than a silicone mat to keep cookies from sticking to the baking sheet, and instead of investing in a set of pastry bags for piping decorative streaks onto cookies and cakes, she recommends using a zip-top plastic bag with one corner snipped to allow a straight line of frosting.

''Just start by cutting a tiny edge off," she said. ''You can always make the hole bigger, but you can't go back."

Karter, an accomplished painter, also has ideas for easy ways to turn cookies into holiday art.

She and development baker Milton Torres demonstrated how to cut out two identical shapes with a cookie cutter, place a looped piece of kitchen twine on one half of the dough, then the other piece on top. Bake it, decorate it, and you have a Christmas tree decoration.

For any home baker ambitious enough to attempt a gingerbread house, Karter showed how to use a cardboard box not only as the stencil, but the actual structure, attaching the gingerbread panels directly to the box with royal icing, which gets as hard as cement when it dries.

''Remember," she said, ''nobody actually eats the gingerbread house. It doesn't have to taste good; it just has to look good."

Joe Yonan can be reached at yonan@globe.com.For Karter's recipes and to watch her demonstrate holiday baking techniques, go to boston.com/business.