Yummy Cookies

This is one of the many cookie recipes that I only make at Christmastime.  When they're gone, you're out of luck!  Because these are dry by nature, they last a long time.  When other cookies have become stale and disgusting, these taste just as good (maybe better) than they did on Day One.
First:  Cream together two sticks (one cup) of butter (no substitutes) with 4 tablespoons of granulated sugar.  Keep that mixer going until you have the lightest, fluffiest, most beautiful creamed sugar and butter you've ever seen.

Like this!

While your mixer is churning away, add to a separate bowl two cups of finely chopped walnuts, and two cups of all-purpose flour.  Stir those together.

Back to the mixer!  Add 2 teaspoons of pure vanilla extract.  Now add the flour/nut mixture.

Chill the batter in an air-tight container for a few hours or overnight.

Line a baking sheet with parchment and scoop out the dough one tablespoonful at a time.  If you have a scoop, so much the better.  Scoop them all out leaving about an inch of space between them.

Deliciousness

Before baking, roll each scoop of dough into a pretty little ball.  (If the dough gets too sticky, pop it back into the freezer for a few minutes.)  Sadly, I have no pictures of this step.  But, the one below is what they look like after they've baked in a 350-degree oven for 15 minutes.  While you're waiting, get your hands on some mini-parchment cups and lay those out in rows, ready to go for the next step.

You can fit a LOT of these type on a pan.

While they're still warm, lift them off one at a time and roll them in powdered sugar.  Silicone gloves are useful for this step, or if you're good with chopsticks use those.  Be careful--not only are these puppies hot, they are also fragile.  Give them a nice coating, then oh-so-gently place them in a mini-muffin parchment liner.  The liner will keep them safe and snug and also prevent the powdered sugar from contaminating any other cookies they may find themselves sitting beside in the future, say on a cookie platter.

Oh the yumminess...

When they've been nestled safely into the parchment cups, you may shake more powdered sugar on top.  It's Christmas after all!
The Recipe
Mexican Wedding Cakes (yields approximately 45 cookies)
1 cup butter (no substitutes)
4 tablespoons sugar
2 cup all-purpose flour
2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cup walnuts, finely ground
powdered sugar, to coat
Cream together the butter and sugar.  Add the vanilla. 
In a separate bowl, stir together the nuts and flour. 
Combine the flour mixture with the creamed butter and sugar. 
Roll the dough into 1 inch balls. 
Bake for 15 minutes at 350. 
While still hot, roll each cookie in powdered sugar.
Place each into mini-parchment cup liner.
Shake additional powdered sugar over the top when cooled.

Random Shots

Wants to see the picture!

Santa Baby

 No school today!  Wheee!

Not only that.  It's my BIRTHDAY and so I did what I always do--packed up a bunch of treats to give away to friends far and near.

My kids are off delivering to our near neighbors right now!

Later on we'll deliver to people further away.  This family tradition started even before we had kids, and it's one my older kids look forward to every Christmas season.  They help with every stage of the prep (which is a good thing, because I could never do it alone).

Cookies for the neighbors.  Two neighborhoods.  Plus a couple of old friends.

They love playing Santa!

Preparations

So much going on here!

We hosted Thanksgiving, though our kitchen is disgusting...bad floor, bad counters, bad decor. Bad, bad, bad. Not that it mattered! The food was good. The company was grand. Liam clung to his 20+ yo cousin that he sees about once/year (so that would be twice in his life) like he was his long-lost friend. So sweet.


Advent. Made a wreath for the first time ever. Sadly, it looks pretty bedraggled at the end of the third week--one more to go. I vacuumed up about 7,486 needles from the wreath alone yesterday! How do people get these to stay green for the full four weeks?


Christmas! If you know me at all, you know THIS is the stuff I get all excited about! Baking gazillions of cookies, making cards, decorating, wrapping gifts and crafting ornaments and goodies of all sorts. Sadly, all of my stamping and sewing supplies are still in their packing boxes. I have been filling the void with baking!

I love how they all seem to have a personality when they're decorated.


Liam was pretty proud of his creation.

The little baby has discovered the joys of bouncing! He is soooo happy in this thing.

Isn't he getting BIG? He's wearing 12mos clothes most of the time, though I will keep him in this 9mo sleeper until it won't stretch any further because it is so soft and cute. Why-oh-why won't Carters make soft, cuddly sleepers in sizes larger than 9mos? I would buy a dozen of them, if only they were available! (Are you listening, Carters?)

Elves at Work

I had lots of help with this year's Christmas cards (thank you, loving helpers!!!). Here they are, busily cutting and gluing pieces together. Somehow, we always end up working on cards up to the very last moment. Believe it or not, these cards were begun in January, yet here we were mere days away from the last mailing opportunity, assembling like mad-people.

We made "many".

Here's a closeup. The cookie stamps are from Too Much Fun except the snowmen, which were created from photos of actual cookies. The pop-out snowman was colored with PrismaColors, and the rest were done via PhotoShop. Pistachio cardstock came from The Paper Cut.

M E R R Y C H R I S T M A S!!!

Baking Notes

We make dozens and dozens of cookies each year. It's one of my favorite parts of getting ready for Christmas. This year I had lots of help from Patrick and the kids.

These are some reflections about things I learned this year. I always learn something, even if I am making the same varieties year after year.

These thumbprints, for instance, could be spaced much closer together than the recipe states. Two inches apart...what were they thinking? They don't expand that much.

Also, filling these babies using a squeeze bottle for the jelly worked like a dream.


Next, Mexican Wedding Cakes. I may never make these again. What a mess! Some of them crumbled during the coating process, breaking into a million pieces and causing me to make unkind remarks about their brittleness. The recipe called for baking at 300F for 40 minutes. Forty minutes? Who has that kind of time. I baked them at 350 for 12. Maybe that was the problem. Still. These things are sticky after the first coat of powdered sugar, and fragile. I decided to put them in mini-parchment cups to control the mess. The second coating came via a sugar-shaker.



Next up, the family favorite: Carolers. These are a not-sweet cutout-cookie, meant to frost and decorate. I watched an episode of Martha recently where she touted the ease of rolling out any variety of cutout-cookie dough onto a silpat, then placing that onto a baking sheet, cutting out the shapes directly and whisking the whole shebang into the freezer for a couple of minutes. She then removed the "negative" pieces of dough and baked the cookies as usual. Oh, this sounded like a real time-saver.

Ha! and Double Ha! What it was, was a mess. I ended up using my offset spatula to clear the baking sheet of all dough and starting over with my own (tried and true) method. Witness the simplicity. Even a child can do it.

First, place a piece of plastic wrap on your work surface. Scoop out a heaping tablespoon of chilled cookie dough onto the wrap. Place another piece of wrap on top.

Use your super-wham-o-dyne pastry sticks (not sure what these are called, but you can use square moulding too, which is commonly available at hardware stores) to guide your rolling pin and achieve a uniform thickness of dough. Note that with this method, you only roll out enough dough to cut one cookie.


Remove the top layer of plastic, cut out your cookie, then use the bottom layer of wrap to lift the cut-out from the workspace and in one fell swoop you are able to remove the "negative" dough, and deposit the "positive" dough onto your prepared baking sheet. Viola! A perfect cut-out.

Though it may not seem that way from the written description, I think that this method is faster than the traditional method, and certainly more successful (for me anyway) than Martha's method. Once you get a rhythym going, you'll be filling baking sheets in no time flat.

Incidentally, the way I like to decorate these types of cookies is to frost with white, then decorate with sprinkles, m&m baking bits, nuts, nonpareils, etc. The kids get very creative. Can you make out the word "peace" spelled out on the girl's dress below? The bonus for me is that it doesn't require the mixing of twenty-seven different colors of frosting.


When all was baked and decorated, we wound up with eight varieties of cookies, plus many dozens of turtles to build our cookie plates.

Liam got exhausted watching all the action.


His favorite are the date-nut pinwheels.

The Portrait You Won't Be Getting

It went downhill from here very fast.

The Carnage was Frightful

Today is not starting out well. Yesterday the girls and I laid the foundation for 300+ turtles. This morning 2/3 of them wound up on the floor. Stinking gravity! The sound of the baking sheets crashing to the floor woke everyone up--fabulous. Below is a portion of the dead turtles. Aren't they sad?

My camera refused to give up its photos this morning. Switching to a different computer worked eventually, but what should have been a 2-minute process took about 30. I don't have 30 minutes to spare until Christmas! ack!!!

Shopping isn't done.

Baking isn't done.

Card-making isn't done.

It's going to be a very, very busy day. I hope the kids decide to cooperate. If they don't, they're all getting tossed into the nearest snowbank.

Advent Calendar

Here's a neat idea for a do-it-yourself Advent calendar. One of these years I'm going to do this.

Not this year, I fear.

Counting Down

It's snowing outside--giant, fluffy flakes. It's starting to feel like Christmas! We have a bit of a dilemma this year, about where to put the tree. We're thinking of getting an itty bitty potted tree, in which case the ornaments above will remain in storage.

The family room got smaller, you see. In January we added a treadmill because there was no other space to place it.

Somehow I can't envision a full-sized, bedecked Christmas tree surviving in the same room with a treadmill that gets pounded on multiple times per week.

What to do...