Baking Christmas Cookies

Do you enjoy baking Christmas Cookies at your house? Do you have a special time that you bake them or a special kind you make? This year we’ve made 4 kinds of cookies…so far! (There might be more in the works!) Here’s a peek into our Christmas cookies escapades…

We started out making butter cookies, which were always one of my favorites as a kid. These are a cutout type of cookie.

Everything was going along just fine. The trays were filling up with cookies ready to be decorated before baking.

I started to roll out some more dough when…crack! Oh nooo!

My rolling pin was pretty old. I believe it belonged to my grandmother, so it’s rather sad that it broke. I think I will save it and turn it into the craft of some sort, but now how to roll out the rest of the cookie dough?? This calls for a trip to the store! There were only two rolling pins left in the store, but one was all I needed! And its a big one!

So we were back in business! Once the rest of the cookies were cutout and sprinkles were added, then on to the baking! Mmmm! It smelled so good in here!

Don’t they look delicious? 🙂 Don’t look too closely…some of them might be a little too brown.

I mixed up a second batch of cookie dough and put it in the fridge to chill. Then made the 3rd batch…ohhh…hmmm…I think I forgot the vanilla in the 2nd batch…oops! Back to the “drawing board”! Next I made some Molasses Crinkles cookies. (You can’t tell from this picture but some of them got too brown too. My oven and I are at war with each other!)

Next came the Russian Teacakes. Oh, man, do we love these! I turned my oven down, put the cookies on a higher rack and left them in for less time. Smart, right? Some still got too brown. But rolled in lots of powdered sugar you really can’t tell and they still taste great. 😉

Then it was time to go back to the ones I had to make over because of the forgotten vanilla. This was a new way to do cookies for me, using terra cotta cookie stamps.

The recipe said to bake the cookies and then stamp them right away when you take them out of the oven. I wanted to add some colored sugar on the cookies and wondered if I should add the sugar before or after baking and stamping? So I tried one tray with the sprinkled on sugar before baking and one tray without. I found out that it doesn’t work to have sugar on the cookies before stamping. So forget that idea. The right way is to bake, stamp and then sprinkle. 😉 So here are the Snowflake Cookies.

That’s all the cookies I’ve made so far. I’m thinking about some peanut butter ones…or maybe Peanut Butter and Jam bars. The moral of the story is that if your cookie baking doesn’t go perfectly, don’t sweat it! I had things go wrong and we have some cookies that only my husband and I will be eating, but mostly the cookies turned out tasty! 😉 I’d love to hear about your cookie baking traditions at your house and what kinds you like to make. Happy Eating! 🙂