December 1: Christmas Cookies

I started writing this last night, but I was too exhausted to finish.  Then I woke up feeling horribly sick, and I had to stay home from church this morning.  My stomach has issues sometimes, and I don't think it was too happy about all the Christmas cookies I sampled yesterday.  I am feeling quite a bit better now, so here is yesterday's post!

It's day one and I am already changing my schedule!  The plan was to go to the Christmas parade today.  I looked at a calendar on a local website on Wednesday, and it said the parade was at 10 am today.  But then I found out that was wrong, and the parade is actually on December 15 at 5:00 pm.  They changed it this year to a Holiday Lights parade.  So that might be cool, but chances are it is not going to be 60 degrees on December 15.  Today would have been perfect parade watching weather!

So, I decided to swap December 1 and 15 of our advent activities, which means today's activity was:  make Christmas cookies and deliver them to friends.

December 1 seems a little early for Christmas cookies, but I figured this would be a good time to give people goodies, before they have had a chance to be overwhelmed with the sweets of the season.

I made a plan, and then Audrey and I got to work!  Audrey's help lasted for about 10 minutes, and then she was ready to do something else. 

I have to say that my plans are always more ambitious than my abilities and motivation.  About halfway into this day, I was starting to rethink this idea.  But we kept going and all the cookies and sweets are now finished.  Just don't ask me what my kitchen looks like right now.  Or what I feel like right now.

Here's what we made:

Sugar Cookies

I used this recipe for the cookies and this recipe for the icing.   I am pretty sure these are the recipes I used last year for sugar cookies, and I really thought that the dough was super easy to work with.  Not so much today!  The dough seemed really sticky.  I finally got smart and put it in the freezer for a while.  Then I just pulled out small chunks at a time to roll out and cut, and I left the rest of the dough in the freezer until I was ready for more.  That ended up working okay, and I thought the cookies ended up tasting good.

I do love this icing recipe.  It is more like a glaze than icing.  It dries hard, so you can stack the cookies on top of each other.  I just painted it on the cookie.  I don't have a lot of patience for cookie decorating, so mine weren't anything too fancy.  But it was quick and easy and tasty too!

Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Fudge

 I don't like fudge, so I'm not sure what made want to make this.  The end result was super sweet, which I guess is the reason why I don't like fudge so much!  I thought it tasted like chocolate chip cookie dough icing.  I was not a big fan, and I almost didn't include it in our boxes of goodies to give away.  But, I figured others might have a sweeter tooth than me, so I included it.  I will have to survey everyone who we gave cookies to see if anyone enjoyed it or not!

Peanut Butter Pretzel Truffles

These were so good!!  So good.  I'm sad because the recipe only made 16, and I really should have doubled it! 

White Chocolate Peppermint M&M Cookies

These tasted really good, but I had a hard time getting them exactly right.  They were really big cookies, much bigger than I expected.  (Though when I went back and read the recipe, she did say that they make large cookies.  I should have read more closely I guess!).  My first batch was not quite done, and they were too gooey.  My second batch was better, but they were so big that they weren't holding together the greatest.  If I make these again, I will make them a little smaller, and I think that will make them better.

That's all!  It doesn't seem like so much written here, but it took ALL DAY to finish everything.  Audrey helped me off and on throughout the day.  She was most excited about delivering the cookies though.

I got these boxes from the Target dollar spot a while back, and they coordinated perfectly with this red/white polka dot parchment paper from World Market.   I printed out a little tag for each box, and then Audrey decorated the tags by drawing pictures of all the people who would receive the cookies.

Audrey and Daniel drove around tonight and delivered the boxes of goodies.  Audrey had so much fun taking the cookies to everyone; that was definitely the highlight for her!  Daniel was supposed to take pictures of their cookie delivering adventure, but he forgot.

Whew, that's the end of our cookie making day.  I think I might be done baking for a while!