Christmas Cookies!

I love Christmas Cookies. I am not much of a cook or baker but every year I do at least try to make frosted sugar cookies. This year was cutting it close but I finally got to bake this last weekend and I went nuts.

Normally I use a prepared recipe for sugar cookies (the kind you can get in a box at Costco) but when I went shopping at Fred Meyer they didn't have any. The nerve!!! So I ended up looking up a recipe online at the Food Network. It was a LOT more complicated than I am used to and I didn't exactly follow it to a T. =) But I did cook from scratch. That counts for something right?

I didn't have unsalted butter so I didn't use the salt called for in the recipe and figured the salted butter would work just fine. I also didn't use my big ol' Kitchenaid mixer - the one my mother gave us for our wedding and that I have never once used. Why start now?

So I used the really old hand mixer that she gave me ages ago (it's so old that she used it when daddy was still alive ... we're talking more than 20 years!) and it works just fine. Although it didn't really do what the recipe called for - which was to beat until the dough pulled away from the side. Um...yeah the "dough" was all over the bowl! And it just wasn't working.

That's what hands are for right? I dove in and mixed the dough until it was the proper consistency. Phew! I hate getting my hands icky.

The recipe called for two hours in the fridge so I finished up some jewelry and wrapped some presents while watching Monster in Law. Very funny movie by the way.

Another thing that made this process a *little* more difficult - I don't actually own a rolling pin. *blush* Never have. I normally make due with a round glass of some sort. heh Well, the dough coming out of the fridge was REALLY hard so I knew if I tried the glass trick the glass would break with all the pressure I had to enforce. So I used my hands again and beat the dough into submission. That worked quite well and made it soft enough so I could use my poor glass 'rolling' pin.

I got these fabulous cookie cutters from my work Secret Santa - they are Gingerbread men with "bites" already taken out. ROFL One without a head. One with a missing arm and the other missing a leg. I think they're hilarious. And they make really great cookie cutouts. Between those and the neat tiny Pampered Chef cutters I had some really neat shapes.

The frosting event occurred the next day. Some of the cookies "accidentally" broke so of course I *had* to eat them. Needless to say I was on quite a sugar high all day. But all in all I think my work turned out quite well...

Trooper thought so and ate most of this entire plate! He would have continued if I hadn't heard his collar hitting the plate.

Luckily I had taken photos before he could destroy all the evidence of my homemaking abilities. See the gingerbread men? They rock!

And the surviving cookies made it to work where they were promptly devoured by coworkers feeding their sugar addictions. Thankfully I won't do this again for another year.