Holiday Cookies – more than just baking!
This weekend, I helped a friend bake cookies for her work. The conversation went a little like this about a week ago (after she ate a cookie I made at a party I hosted)…
Her – “I need to make 8 dozen cookies for a thing at work next week! Any advice?” Me – “Ooh, I’ll help you make cookies!” Her – “No, no, I didn’t mean for you to help. You must have other plans! I’m just not a baker and don’t know where to begin.”
If you’re a non-baker you don’t know why anyone would volunteer to spend the day in your kitchen baking cookies.
If you’re a baker, you can’t think of a more fun way to hang out with friends than baking all day!
It’s not about the baking…
Chatting and eating and cleaning and eating some more. It’s a great way to spend time with those you care about AND make treats for others you care about!
Strudel and I used to spend all day in my kitchen around the holidays baking treats (back when we lived in the same city). It was the greatest time. It was during one of these holiday baking sessions we came up with Strudel and Streusel (the name of the bakery we were going to some day own – of course). Helping my friend bake cookies this weekend was no different and at the end of it all, she surprisingly said, “This was really fun!”
It’s about time spent together…
I know no better way to ring in the holidays and December than baking with friends and family. I hope that you get the opportunity to do the same this month. In honor of cookie month here at S & S, I wanted to share with you the five recipes we made this weekend. Yes, yes, you’re thinking THIS IS WAY MORE than 8 dozen cookies and you’d be right.
This is the thing about baking, once you start, you just want to keep going and make enough cookies for EVERYONE!
The only thing we didn’t do was finish the cookie with a drizzle of chocolate as in the original recipe. I made these cookies BIG, I feel like it’s the only way to enjoy these cookies. After being baked they were about 3 inches in diameter. This recipe made 20 cookies.
This is a great recipe for first time holiday cookie bakers! We doubled the batch and it made 32 cookies. Best part – unwrapping the hershey kisses and discovering you unwrapped more kisses than cookies baked! Enough said.
This recipe made 30 cookies. We used peanut M & Ms instead of regular M & Ms! I highly recommend it.
Classic Cut-out Cookies with Royal Icing
Both of these recipes are my go-to when I need a cut-out cookie. It might have been too much chatting but the dough was a little drier than I’m used to, so I threw in another egg and about 1/4 melted butter and all was right again! This recipe makes gobs of cookies, I don’t even know how many, maybe 5 or 6 dozen?! My favorite – the Christmas trees.
Always a favorite. I think it takes most adults back to their childhood, it does me. We we’re so busy baking other cookies (and doing that chatting and eating thing I talked about earlier) that I never snapped a pic of these glorious bars. We made 36 of these.
All in all the baking adventure totaled 4 friends, 4 hours and about 15 dozen cookies. Those cookies will get eaten up in no time but the laughter and fun will be remembered well into next year.
Happy Holiday baking ahead.
December 1, 2019This entry was posted in baking, cookies, holidays and tagged baking with friends, holiday cookies, peanut butter cookies, peanut butter kisses, salted chocolate chip.
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