Cookies Cookies Cookies

Ok so I've been on a roll lately. I love cookies. They are little pieces of art. Don't cookies make people happy? They make me happy, for sure. So fun to make, even if it is a lot of work. Christmas gives me the perfect excuse to make a mess of cookies. I planned ahead which ones I wanted to make, wrote up an ingredients list, and have been slowly working away at it and putting them in the freezer. The ones that need to be iced (like the chocolate trees at the bottom, and the sugar cookies I'll be making later this week) will be thawed out and iced Christmas Eve Day.

Here are the latest. I have used my shortbread mold. The tricky part is getting the cookie batter to fill in all the design. You can't tell if you managed to do that or not until after the cookie is done baking. Next time I use it, I'm going to experiment a bit to see what is the best way to do this.

The mold:

Slap that batter on a greased mold:

Pat it down with your fingers:

Poke the top with a fork. (I forgot this step once, and it didn't seem to make a difference, fwiw)

It is done baking: (I sprinkled a little raw sugar on it before it baked.)

Let it sit for 15 minutes or so, then flip it and hopefully it will pop right out. I only had trouble once because I forgot to re-grease the pan (lightly with olive oil), but it didn't give me a hard time.

See the indentations where there shouldn't be?

Ah well, still pretty and yummy!

I made ginger shortbread, lemon shortbread, plain shortbread of course, and orange spice shortbread. The recipe for shortbread is so easy and well - short - that just changing the flavoring ingredients is all it takes to alter the recipe.


Then I made chocolate cookies. Lots of cocoa in these babies! YUM! Ah the sun is setting on the trees. A fun day of baking.


Mr. Biddles was close-by to supervise. See how excited he is about all the cookies?


Yup. It's a tough life.