Christmas Cookies

Our gingerbread couples!

Yesterday afternoon, I found myself at Carleen's to bake our Christmas cookies. We started around 12:30 and finally finished around 4:30. It was a fun day for both of us, and of course, we finished it off with a glass of wine!

To start off our baking fun, we made simple sugar cookies. I had the pleasure of rolling the dough out. I can't remember the last time I actually had to roll out dough since all I ever seem to make is drop cookies. Cutting out the cookies was fun. The cookie cutters we had were: snowflake, star, candy cane, stocking, circles, and a gingerbread man (which didn't make it's presence until the gingerbread dough).

Here's a picture of some of the cookies. Yes, some do look a little brown, but they taste just as good!

One we used up all but a little blob of the sugar cookie dough, we moved on to the gingerbread dough! That was a fun dough to work with. How do you not love the smell of gingerbread? Makes my mouth water as I'm writing this. Most of the dough was turned into gingerbread men, but we threw some snowflakes and candy canes in there as well. As we were finishing up, Carleen decided that we needed gingerbread girls. She even made legs/shoes for them before using up the little blob to make a fish.

So after all of our hard work rolling, cutting out, and baking, we still were not done. What good is a cookie if it doesn't have any frosting?! Exactly! So off to work again. We used Betty Crocker Whipped frosting and Lowe's Food frosting and for our colors we used the Betty Crocker food coloring gels, which is what I would recommend using from now on since you do get more vibrant colors. In addition to the frosting, we had cinnamon balls, crystal sprinkles of a variety of colors, sugar circles and flowers, and gel icing (which Carleen forgot all about until the very end).

After all was said and done, we relaxed with a glass of wine and then I was on my way home to get ready for the party at Gail's (Carleen's neighbor), which is why we made so many cookies.