Christmas Cookie Classics

Hark! It’s almost Christmas!  This year has flown by and it’s hard to believe that the annual friends cookie baking weekend has come and gone. 

For the past several years, I’ve been firing up the old sleigh and heading up to Licking County for a holiday cooking extravaganza with my dear pals Abby and Lindsey, and their momma Mae – who is great for answering questions like, “is this butter browned enough?” or “can I mix all my dough in the food processor?” or even, “how much longer do these egg whites need to go?” – plus hundreds of others!

Over the years we have made countless recipes of cookies, candies, bags of random mixes, noodles, and whatever else inspired us.  Each recipe is mixed with a healthy dose of cuss words for the added holiday flare.

This year Lindsey had the bug so she couldn’t come (we missed you Linds!) but she sent her two little girlies to help out, and they did a great job!

Auntie Abby & Madeline cutting it up! 

Avery enjoyed finding miscellaneous treasures around the house when she needed a break :)

New to the cookie event was Miss Baby Morgan, who seemed to enjoy the shenanigans.  We are looking forward to many years of cookie baking with this one!  I'm sure she'll have sweet skills!

Baby Morgan was hopped up on excitement!

OK, so now that you know the parties involved, I’ll get to the cookies!  I always make jam thumbprints from a recipe I got out of a random Columbus Library cookbook years ago, if I find it, I'll share it later!  

This is the start of the jam thumbprints.  Nom nom butter, sugar, and eggs. 

Add a few more things and it's a fab dough!

These little dandies are rolled in coconut before they're baked, and after they cool they get a scoop of jam - raspberry in this case.

This year for some reason I got a wild streak and decided to swap out my other go to / always makes snicker doodles for gingerbread cookies.  SPOILER!!! This was a mistake, LOL.

I had high hopes for this recipe, I mean it was from freaking America’s Test Kitchen – like, those people know how to cook.  And they’re always smiling, and complimenting themselves, and having reactions of extreme pleasure after taking a taste of whatever they have created. 

I did not have such occurrences when I made their recipe.   For the record, I brought a box of cookies home and my dad ate ALL of them except these gingerbread cookies.  That’s saying something.

So maybe I just don’t like gingerbread.  After this recipe, I find that it suitable for decorative houses only – not for eating. 

Here’s the scoop on the g-bread:

I believe firmly, that the root is the grossness is molasses.  Read it correctly, molASSes. 

Grandma got this wrong.  Barf.

So I kind of kept thinking of Gingy from Shrek and felt sad.  Poor flat, fat legged cookie :(

But I like to end my blogs on a high note, so check out these amazing cookies decorated by Abby, her nieces, and her basically better than America’s Test Kitchen people momma!

Abby - "Cara, can you take a pic of us?"
Me: "Sure! Everyone look over here!!"

Nice work Madeline and Avery!  You girlies have the gift!

Happy holiday baking to add, and to all a nice glass of wine!