Rain, rain, and then some more rain yesterday! Our dogs took the rain as a personal affront but I decided it would make a great day for Christmas baking.
My early baking days (way back in the stone age of my youth!), often left the kitchen in complete shambles. The product result of those days was quite good but my baking time seeped into fixing dinner time and some of the ho, ho, ho went out of the holidays when hungry children and husband wanted something more than another cookie for dinner.
Old age has a few compensations! I've discovered organization and my baking shows the improvement. I actually got seven batches of cookies baked, iced, and packed away with time to spare. My one secret to getting a jump on the baking is to bake the brownies first. They take one pan and while they are doing their 20-minute time in the oven, I have time to mix up another batch of bar cookies. After that, comes the molded cookies likes snow ball cookies. Once the bulk of the baking is either under way or done, I get to think about more labor intensive types. At the close of baking, yesterday, I just has a few dishes left to wash (no dishwasher at our house) and an hour to work on some crocheting projects. Dinner was on time and it was definitely a nice beginning of the season. The end results of my cookie baking was white and chocolate chip cookies, almond snowball cookies, chocolate/cherry/nut cocoa snowball cookies, Snickerdoodles, brownies, date bars, Amish Sugar cookies.
Plates of cookies were distributed to friends today and the exclamation from one friend, "Oh, I'm so happy! Snowball cookies, my favorite!" made it all worthwhile.
Anyone interested in any of my recipes, please let me know and I'll post it. Anyone having a family favorite to share, please let us know and share.
A word to the wise . . . For the best (in my opinion!) spices, flavorings, and extracts, check out, on-line, Cook's Vanilla, Penzy Spices, and Spices, Etc. Did you know there is more than one kind of vanilla? Or, that cinnamon comes in different strengths and flavors?
