A Departure from Tradition

Traditionally, each year I make tons and tons of Christmas sugar cookies. I use my mother's fantastic recipe. They are truly the most delicious sugar cookies I've ever had. In that past, we've held a cookie decorating party with friends and frosted dozens upon dozens of cookies. Our friends would take cookies home and we would distribute the leftovers to other friends and neighbors. This year, as I began planning our holiday season I was distraught with trying to figure out when and how we would do our Christmas cookie decorating party. Not only are there less days between Thanksgiving and Christmas, but two of the families that we usually invited to the cookie decorating party have moved away.*

So as I thought more and more about it, I decided not to hold the party. That meant that if I wanted to give away sugar cookies, I would have a LOT of cookies to cut and frost and that was way too daunting. So this year I decided that we would give out a conglomeration of Christmas goodies that could be mass produced much more easily than sugar cookies. I skimmed through my cookbooks and even checked out a few cookbooks from the library.

And I ended making the following items - m&m cookies, white chocolate fudge, milk chocolate fudge, peppermint snowballs, oreos dipped in chocolate, and cream cheese candies.**

Here's what a sample plate looked like:

Not bad, eh? I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. And, don't worry, I do plan to make a batch of sugar cookies for our family in time for Christmas, because for me, Christmas would not be Christmas without sugar cookies.

Here's Matt and Ellie making the cream cheese candies.
And Annie going through my cookbooks, one of her favorite pastimes in the kitchen.

*You know who you are.
**Matt's family tradition.