Christmas Cookies

I love Christmas baking! First, here is my final tray of cookies.

I made:
Gingerbread cookies
Roll-out sugar cookies
Almond candy
Peppermint marshmallows
Chocolate Peanut Butter Blossoms
Mexican Wedding Cakes


My assembly line of sugar cookie decorating. The squeeze bottles contain the thin "flooding" icing- it squeezes out very thinly and will harden eventually. The pastry bags have my coordinating colors of piping icing.

I found that making a true red icing is very difficult. I remember that I gave up the year before when I started to mix the colors. I got so frustrated by my failure that I didn't even decorate or finish the cookies!

My Christmas trees are pretty wild looking. I remembered that I had christmas light bulb and candy cane decorations from the year before, so we decorated using those. I still had a lot to learn about the piping and flooding techniques!



The swirled candy canes were my favorites! Especially the ones with the green and red.


Marshmallows are surprisingly easy to mae. I would not do the swirls again though. The food color clumped and looked like something unpleasant- blood. The peppermint flavor was nice though. That's all it really needed anyway!

Marshmallows are cut into squares and tossed with powdered sugar to prevent them from sticking together. Mmmmm... imagine these bad boys in some hot chocolate!

Click here for the stolen recipe for marshmallows.

Click here for the stolen recipe for Chocolate Peanut Butter Blossoms. These cookies were an accident. I asked Jim to print out the recipe for the regular Peanut Butter Blossoms, he mistakenly printed CHOCOLATE Peanut Butter Blossoms, with cocoa in the peanut butter cookie dough. It ended up being a very nice mistake!

Click here for the stolen recipe for Martha's Mexican Wedding Cake Cookies. I actually got the recipe from my Martha Stewart Cookies cookbook, but the recipe is online.

There is no stolen recipe for the sugar cookies YET. I still need to type this out from my cookbook Cookie Craft.

There will never be a stolen recipe for the Almond Candy. I am sworn to secrecy on that recipe. For real!

Click here for the stolen recipe for Gingerbread Cookies. These are AWESOME. I did make the mistake of leaving these out overnight (to dry) and if they are on the thin side, again, they get stale. I made them thicker the next time and they were much better. Actually they didn't really get stale but crispy. I think they are much better soft.

I think Christmas cookies are my best baking experiences. I love it :)