I love thanksgiving and christmas; I love the mood, the music, and the food.

One of the best parts is cookie-day.  Every year I have one or more days devoted to making treats for christmas, and today was the first. 

We baked:
4 batches of almond sugar cookies with an extra teaspoon of almond extract
2 batch of sour cream sugar cookies
1 batch of raspberry pinwheels
2 batches of chocolate chip
1 batch of cochinitas (mexican spice cookies)

We also had two partial failures;
1 batch of lemon pecan cookies; too dry to roll so we baked them as balls and tossed in confectioners sugar; very tasty
1 batch of spritz cookies which wouldn’t come out of the spritz machine – we cut them into slices and bake them as rounds

And one complete failure
1 batch of chocolate sugar cookies that were too dry to roll or even turn into balls.  I’ll make another batch tomorrow or the next day.

We also made
1 batch of plain chocolate truffles
1 batch of dark chocolate caramel fleur de sel truffles

We iced about half of the sugar cookies with a yummy buttercream in red, white, and green and added sprinkles.  (The other half were frozen for later.)

The truffles are in the fridge and will be dipped in melted chocolate tomorrow.  I may have to make more of the caramel ones; the filling is AMAZING.

My feet are tired, and I think I ate a million calories in sugar today, but we are WELL stocked with cookies.

Now I get to recover and do it again in 2 weeks.  I will get those chocolate sugar cookies right.

I love to cook and bake.  That is one of the hobbies I have set aside while doing school work.  That made today especially enjoyable.

My best friend was the one who baked all the cookies with me.  We don’t get to see each other very often, between my school work and her two young children (1 an 4) and the fact that she lives on the far side of town (40 minute drive with no traffic), so it was great to spend a day chatting and baking and just catching up.

All in all, this is the kind of day that I need many many more of.