Tis the season for baking!  Add in the fact that we have been buried under 2+ feet of snow, and I’m really glad that I had a 50lb. bag of flour and 48 eggs in the house!

Yes, Christmas is this week, and we spent the weekend being snowed in and baking.  It was a good weekend!

All told, I think we baked 9 different kinds of cookies… and it was so fun!

Lemon Hazlenut Biscotti… from the cookbook “Great Cookies”

Chocolate Peanut Butter Cookies – from Hersheys.com

Pumpkin Leaves  – I cheated on these, I had some Cougar Mountain Pumpkin Cookie Dough in the fridge… but we did roll them out on a powdered sugar covered surface and cut them rather than doing drop cookies like normal.  Very yummy!

Cream Cheese and Lemon Sugar Cookies – thick, moist, lemon-y cookies!

We used the lemon sugar cookie dough to also make stained glass window cookies – just make cut-outs in the cookie dough and fill it with crushed hard candies like Jolly Ranchers or Dum-Dum pops.  Very tasty and so pretty!  Take them out just a little sooner than normal so the candy doesn’t burn, and let them cool completely on the pan.

I also found a recipe for Low-Fat Sugar Cookies that only called for 2.5 Tbsp of butter… which is an amazingly low amount!  Make sure you roll them a little closer to the 1/8″ thickness though so it cooks through.  Surprisingly tasty, and very low-fat by comparison!

Then we made Gingerbread Angels.  Since my molasses is a bit on the stronger side I halved the amount called for, but I think that may have been a mistake.  Our angels came out with a bare hint of a molasses aftertaste, but they are still very tasty.  They were especially tasty dipped in the lemon-powdered sugar glaze for the biscotti!

We also morphed the sugar cookie dough into jelly filled cookies.  Cut one solid circle, cut one circle with a shaped cut-out in the center.  If you forget to fill them first (oops!), bake them, then spread jelly in between the layers.   Otherwise you can spread the jelly in the middle and seal the edges of the 2 cookies.  Either way, they are quite yummy

I was planning to make Sinful Chocolate Cookies, but I don’t seem to have any cake mixes left in the house (these cookies are the only time we use them!)  I guess I’ll have to come up with an alternate recipe for them.

They aren’t edible, but we also made some salt dough ornaments.  I added a bit of buckwheat flour to make them easier to knead, and also added some essential oil to make them smell good.  You’ll want to keep them away from any cookies that you plan to eat, as the oil will make them taste odd, but they are a fun craft for kids – both cutting them out and painting them when they are dry!

The final part of our goodie baking was dark chocolate truffles.  Make a thick ganache with chocolate and heavy cream.  Let it cool and roll it into balls.  Chill them and dip them into melted chocolate.  Coat them with cocoa powder and keep chilled.  Soooooooo good!

This was our Christmas baking extravaganza… I hope yours is going well too!

Have a blessed Christmas!

Tags: Christmas baking, cookies, Holiday baking

This entry was posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Cookies, Dessert, Holiday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.