Christmas Cookie Blitz

I had big plans for my holiday baking this year. Last year I gave away red and white themed baking boxes that were pretty cute:

Unfortunately, I spent the weekend I had planned to do all that baking re-enacting some scenes from The Exorcist, so I had to smoosh 3 days of colour-coordination, detail-oriented work into a 5 hour post-work baking blitz this week.  All things considered, I was pretty happy:

 

Santa Hat Meringues, inspired by (though not quite as successful as) Haniela's:

  

Old Fashioned Press Cookies:

 

 

 And I'm not sure what to call these....Red Velvet Hugs?  I picked up some minty white kisses with Christmas sprinkles on the bottom, and knew I wanted to make a version of the peanut butter blossom cookies, but with the kiss flipped over so showcase the sprinkles.  I figured red velvet would make a good base, so I used this recipe from Cooking Light, and added the inverted kisses to the hot cookies as soon as they came out of the oven so that they would melt right into the cookies.

  

And lastly, some melted snowmen cookies.  I made some of these a few years ago, after seeing the idea online.  I can't remember where I first saw the idea, but I do know that Meaghan from The Decorated Cookie is responsible for the original genius idea. I decided to use big marshmallows for the heads, because I thought that would be easier.  These cookies were also made in the days before I really knew how to use royal icing, so they were awkwardly covered in some buttercream:

  

What I remember most about those cookies were what a pain making the actual base was.  Freehand cutting out the cookies was annoying.  So, last year when I found this cookie cutter at Ikea (!) I knew that it was born to be a melting snowman (made even easier by using this roll-out sugar cookie recipe from Culinary Concoctions):

 Then I saw a variation of the cookie in a holiday cookie magazine, that used reese cups for the hat and made the whole cookie the snowman's melted head.  When I saw the Reese bell-shaped cups for the holidays, they seemed destined to be snowmen's hats.  Some royal icing for the snow, a few mini chocolate chips for the eyes, and an orange candy-covered nose, and these were super easy to assemble at 1 am, when all best holiday tasks are accomplished.....

 

Branching Out

Before I met my friend Meaghan, I'd made meringues once or twice, but she seriously loves meringues, which is kind of insipiring.  It's nice to make something you can guarantee is going to be well loved.  When she announced her upcoming Christmas party, my wheels started turning, and I decided to make little mini-Christmas trees, complete with Christmas tree light bulb shaped sprinkles.  Too bad the sprinkles don't actually light up.  Still, I declare: SUCCESS.

And as important as it is to treat other people, you also need to treat yourself. So I treated myself to a lovely new bundt pan.  Beauty!

The Royal We

This weekend I taught a friend how to decorate cookies with royal icing. As a refresher, I spent Saturday decorating with my aunt. I did snowflakes. Lots and lots of snowflakes. Some more successful than others....

Like some kind of egomaniac, most of the photos I took were of the cookies I decorated, but I did get a few of the really lovely ornaments my aunt made. The cell phone photos do not do them justice:

For this afternoon's decorating lesson with my friend, I lost my mind and decided to bake 20 different kinds of cookies, which clearly required about as many colours to be prepared.  That only took half the afternoon.  Luckily this is someone I have made dinner for a few times, so she knows that when I say "just a few minutes of prep" what I really mean is 90 minutes....

But as any person who overextends themselves knows, IT WAS TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Elfavated

Last year my aunt and I decorated some kind of awesome elf cookies for Christmas:

They were kind of fantastic.  But this year's elves were on a whole other level: