C is for Cookie! And Christmas!

I love baking for the holidays. And this year, for the first time in a long time I had (or is that took?) time to play. I picked up a wonderful BH&G magazine full of cookie recipes, plus my cookie decorating book and went to town.

The weekend before decorating we traveled to a work retreat in Dubuque where I was able to go to the Calico Bean Market and stock up on all sorts of sanding sugars, and dragees and sprinkles and flavored chips. (The shop itself is MUCH cuter than their web site.)

I made gingerbread and cut it into various shapes and decorated it with royal icing and those dragees that are so pretty but we're warned shouldn't really be eaten; others had flow icing and when my flow designs weren't quite what I wanted I added some pearlized white sprinkles. I love the dreamy blue white and brown. (Hello, been in my dining/living room anytime recently? lol.)

You're going to sense a theme here. I also did a trial of the sugar cookie recipe and ended up decorating those with more royal icing and sanding sugars.

Here's a close-up of the lime green sanding sugar on the white cookie - it really did add sparkle.

I took a break from the shaped cookies to make some Mexican Chocolate Chipoltle bites - this was my first foray into sandwich cookies. And these have some kick (when you're a woos like me) with the chipoltle powder in them. I used real organic Mexican chocolate in the bits that went into the cookies, but went with Ghiradelli for the ganache filling. And I had problems with the ganache - at first it was perfect...it whipped up after cooling in the fridge exactly like it was supposed to but halfway through putting the cookies together the texture went all crazy; as if I'd added water to the chocolate or something. I'm going to have to figure out what happened there.

My other 'simple' cookie was a caramel corn cookie - they have cornmeal, butterscotch chips, and honey roasted peanuts baked in, then they're rolled in sugar before baking like a peanut butter cookie. To me, these were too sweet when all was said and done. But they turned out very pretty.

Then, it was back to shaped cookies - these cinnamon cookies have a very basic sugar-cookie like dough, though it's laced with cinnamon. Then you melt white chocolate chips and cinnamon chips separately and 'frost' with the candy, swirling some cinnamon glaze into the white chocolate for a marbled effect. I wasn't thrilled with the intensity of the cinnamon on these either (picky, picky) but again I think they look really pretty and if you like cinnamon more than I do, they probably taste great too.

I missed getting a photo of the last batch of cookies - these were chocolate peanut butter blossoms with chocolate stars. I usually make this cookie with just a peanut butter cookie and the start squished in the top when they come out of the oven. This recipe added cocoa powder and had you roll the pre-baked cookie balls in crushed peanuts. They looked much fancier than my usual version.

And I tried truffles. These are really really simple to create - and they have orange liquer in them which gives them a serious yum factor. The chocolate ones came from a recipe that uses sandwich cookies (Oreos or fake oreos) as the base - the cookie is the bulk, the cream filling when mixed with a little corn syrup is the binder...then you just add flavorings and viola! Freeze briefly, then coat in chocolate thinned with vegetable shortening and top with a snowflake sprinkle. I used this same formula to combine flavors from another recipe into a vanilla version - the crushed vanilla cookies are mixed with cashews and craisins.

This weekend everything got boxed up into cookie boxes or tins for shipping and either delivered before the weather turned icy on Saturday, mailed Monday morning to far-flung folk, or they're in the freezer waiting for people to get back from a certain big party in Arizona or me to make the trek to the last few houses I missed.

Very few stuck around for me to eat but those that did are all gone already. I love cookies...