Mountains of Christmas Cookies

Hope everybody had a merry Christmas. Or is having a joyful Kwanzaa. Or is continuing to have a good Hanukkah. Just happy freakin' holidays, okay?

My mom took full advantage of the combination my explosive Christmas cheer and baking habits and put me to work making Christmas cookies. We picked out a few cookie recipes that were supposed to yield ridiculous amounts of cookies: 6 dozen per recipe. And for some reason it was decided that it would be a good idea to double those cookie recipes. And that we should probably make a couple single batches of other cookies, you know, just in case there was a tragic cookie shortage in the near future. All together we made:
- 2 batches of molasses thins
- 2 batches of pecan praline cookies
- 1 batch of my fig pinwheels
- 1 batch of chocolate turtle bars
- 1 batch of pumpkin cookies

Resulting in about a billion dozen cookies.

It took two days and in the end we had an appalling amount of cookies (I spelled 'appalling' wrong the first time and when I tried to choose the correct version, I accidentally chose 'Appalachian' instead. Appalachian cookies!) despite the fact that the recipes were a bit misleading on how much they would make. The reason you were supposed to get 6 dozen cookies out of each recipe was because you were supposed to use teaspoon amounts of dough when you usually roll out tablespoons. So you did indeed get tons of cookies, albeit teeny tiny ones. If you were catering to a party of elves, they would probably be appropriate.


These were the molasses thins, they were slice and bake. I liked them, they had a good molasses flavor and the addition of crushed walnuts was a nice change from regular molasses cookies.


These are the pecan praline cookies. These were probably my favorite. It was a brown sugar chewy cookie topped with pecan and drizzled with praline-y sauce. Did I mention that I don't have the recipes for any of these? I just like to torture you guys.


Here are the pumpkin cookies that we made with the leftovers of my mom's weird organic canned pumpkin. I'm kind of obsessed with canned pumpkin actually, just ask Joe how many jumbo cans of pumpkin he's lugged home for me in the last few months. I stir it in with yogurt or or oatmeal or just eat it plain with some sweetener and cinnamon thrown in. It's freakishly healthy and a half cup counts as a vegetable serving! But I couldn't stomach this weird organic canned pumpkin, it was totally the wrong texture and just tasted like off squash. It fared way better in the cookies though, they were pretty tasty. I've made soft pumpkin cookies that I liked better than these. Though I can't remember what recipe I used so I'm fairly useless.

No pictures of the fig cookies because I forgot. Or the chocolate turtle things, though I can pretty much tell you how to make those: you take a ridiculous amount of crushed graham crackers and dump them in a pan (9x13?) and then pour melted butter over the crumbs and press that all into the pan for the crust. Then you sprinkle chocolate chips and pecans over the crust and top all that with a small can of caramel sauce. Pop it into an oven at 350 until the chocolate chips melt.

I thought they were a little too sweet but I'm not going to lie and say I'm too sophisticated for them or any such nonsense. I would probably skip the caramel sauce though. My favorite part was the buttery gram crust, which I probably could have eaten with a spoon (and possibly did). The recipe did say to assemble the bars in an ungreased pan but after watching my mom pry them out of the pan with a knife while quietly swearing, I'd say you should probably grease the heck out the pan.

After giving away cookies to everybody within a 30 mile radius, we still had a giant platter of assorted cookies. Last time I checked anyways, as I am currently in Hawaii. Don't worry though, I wrote this while it was raining outside, I'm not so sad that I spend my vacations reminiscing about baked goods I made two weeks ago. Though I am tempted to bake when I am not busy slathering myself in SPF 500. My skin is about as pale and delicate as tissue paper and though I tan better than my sister with red hair and freckles, my body still hisses and recoils in direct sunlight.

On a similar note, time to go find a spray tan facility! Am trying not to blind others with my blinding paleness on the beach.