Bake Christmas Cookies For Friends

I love Christmas theme shaped sugar cookies.  Love, Love, Love!  I had always wanted to bake a few batches of cookies and hand them out as mini presents for my closest friends. 

My cousin was coming into town and I always try to find fun activities to do while she is in town.  Why not get her to work and bake Christmas cookies with me!!

We rolled out some store bought sugar cookie dough (cause sometimes they are just as good as ones made from scratch).  I had two cookie cutters, a snow flake and gingerbread man.  After filling the pans with pretty shaped cookies, we had some extra cookie dough to spare.  We decided to use the excess dough to decorate our gingerbread men, with hair, buttons, and facial features.  We even decided to make some that looked like us!

I love my cookies soft so I was constantly checking up on them in the oven so they didn't overcook.

The results:  Perfection.

Afterwards we let them cool and then placed them into goodie bags mixed with some of my favorite Trader Joes cookies.  My friends loved the goodie bags filled with sweet wintery goodness.

I hope to do this again one year!

Date Accomplished:  December 27th, 2009

Bake Cookies From Scratch

I loved baking, but up until after graduating college I solely used boxed cookie, brownie and cake mixes.  That is the only type of baking my mom knows, and those are the baking skills she inherited to me.

One night while in my LA apartment my sweet tooth was raging for some chocolate chip cookies.  It was late at night and I didn't really want to have to get out of my pajamas for a midnight grocery run.  I opened up The New Best Recipe and found a chocolate chip cookie recipe and I just so happened to have all the ingredients on hand.  My roommate had some extra chocolate chips for another recipe, and she gladly gave me the remaining chocolate chips in exchange for a few cookies.  Deal!

I made sure not to over bake the cookies, and the final product was a delectable, chewy, moist chocolate chip cookie!!  My roommate claims till this day that I have been her most favorite roommate.  I'm sure she said that for other reasons too, but I'm absolutely positive that the cookies gave me a few brownie cookie points!

Date Accomplished:  November 6th, 2004