Get Your Cookie On!

Today I got up early to finish my Christmas baking. This is the time of year I pay ABSOLUTELY no attention to what I eat.

None, whatsoever.

My holidays are filled with ALL the good stuff...butter, sugar, nuts, more butter...more sugar, chocolate. I decided a long time ago that life is short, and that we're all gonna go at some point no matter how good our diet is. Besides...I have no other "vices". I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't gamble, I don't do drugs...but what I DO, is enjoy eating. Eating and cooking.

A lot.

This is why I am round. This is why my hubby is getting rounder (he likes what I cook). But I do declare that I AM in shape.

Round...is a shape.

Anyway, mom volunteered to help me finish the baking this morning. Thank goodness. I was pooped. I was up until almost midnight last night making Oreo truffles (both regular and mint). Two days ago, Jonathan and I were up until almost midnight making Spritz cookies. We made 2 kinds...regular butter, and lemon. The butter ones turned out fine. The lemon ones...not so much.

I wanted to leave them plain "white". Jonathan, said they just wouldn't be the same unless they were colored...that they taste different. So, we colored them. Pink, green and blue. They are colorful, I'll give them that.  The lemon dough was SO dense it wouldn't go through the press. It was (I kid you not) the consistency of Playdoh. And, being that we colored the dough...it looked exactly like Playdoh too. So, we scraped all the dough out of the presses and rolled them out and cut shapes out of them. They're pretty substantial (ok...REALLY substantial)...I am considering re-tiling the bathroom floor with them.

Here is a list of what we made this year:

• Lemon Spritz Santa-shaped bathroom tiles
• Butter Spritz cookies
• Rolo/pretzel turtles
• Oreo truffles
• Mint Oreo truffles
• Raspberry thumbprint shortbread cookies
• Apricot thumbprint shortbread cookies

It made for a nice assortment.

So, back to me and mom this morning. Today was thumbprint cookie day. They are my favorites, hands down. After we mixed up the base dough, I tasked mom with making the dough balls. I decided I wanted to be all precise this year and have each dough ball be exactly the same size. So, I set mom up at her dining room table in front of my digital scale. I had her measure out exactly 14g of dough before rolling it into a ball. Jonathan would be proud at how precise we were being.

As mom was forming the dough balls, I took them with my left hand and dunk them in egg white, then toss them into a bowl of chopped pecans. With my right hand I rolled the sticky dough balls around until they were coated, then plopped them on the silicone baking sheet. Then, I smushed my finger into the center of each one to form the area for the jam. So, technically, they are fingerprint cookies.

I spooned jam into a ziplock sandwich bag and snipped off the corner to use it as a piping bag. It was SO much easier than trying to spoon little bits of jam into the center of each cookie.

 Here's what the apricot ones looked like after they were baked. MAN my house smells good.

After they cooled, Jonathan and I boxed all the goodies up into decorative tins and we're on our way now to hand them out to our friends and neighbors.

Don't you wish you were our neighbor????