I like making holiday cookies in theory. But really, almost nothing excites me less than a sugar cookie. And I haven't been brave enough to try gingerbread from scratch. And do you know, I have never once in my life bought molasses. I don't even know where one finds molasses. It's one of those ingredients that just plain intimidates me. I'm assuming it's in the baking aisle, but I've never looked. In case you're as much of a baking expert as me, gingerbread requires molasses.
And while we're on the subject of baking ingredients that stress me out, let's talk about brown sugar. Some beautiful genius came up with this handy little gem for keeping your brown sugar from drying out into one big cement brick.
Anyhow...I recently rediscovered my Pinterest account (after neglecting it for a while since I deleted the app from my phone to free up storage space), and decided to give one of my many pinned cookie recipes a try. I stumbled across this one, which excited me for two reasons. It's for chocolate sugar cookies (any cookie containing chocolate is the cookie for me), and they hold their shape/don't spread out during baking.
I always screw something up during the baking process. Always. For one thing, I didn't realize when I was taking inventory and making my shopping list that I was completely out of vanilla. A quick Google search assured me that maple syrup is, teaspoon for teaspoon, a fine replacement. It did not mention whether or not cheap, terrible-for-you butter-flavored syrup falls into that category...but, onward!
I also completely goofed up the first major step in the dough-making process. I was mixing the wet ingredients with my mixer and letting Ryland handle the dry in a separate bowl, but I missed the part of the recipe that excluded sugar from the dry ingredients. Whoops. I did not cream together my butter and sugar, I mixed the sugar with the flour and other dry ingredients, and I burned out my very old hand mixer trying to get all of my ingredients to combine. I ended up mixing by hand, and to be honest, I found this dough really difficult to work with. I didn't think there was any way these cookies were going to come together.
But they did. Rest assured, it will all be okay in the end.
Don't skimp on refrigeration. The recipe calls for the dough to sit in the refrigerator at different steps in the process, and it's all part of the bigger picture of a cookie that keeps its shape.
During the first hour of our dough chilling in the fridge, Wilder and Isla fell asleep. So Ryland and I had some time with just the two of us, cutting out our cookie shapes. It was SO easy to do with the refrigerated dough. I saved a little ball of cookie dough for the little kids to play with and roll out after their nap.
We decided as a group that the sprinkles we had on hand were not Christmas-y enough, so we decided decorating would wait until after dinner, so Travis could make a run to the store for us after work. I did whip up my own frosting,
I froze a couple of our cookies to leave out for Santa. Less than two weeks until the big night! I feel like I should be more overwhelmed by the fact that there's only one weekend left before Christmas, but I have just about all of my preparations done. I only need to do a little bit of Santa's shopping for him, and get the kids their presents they "need." We (sometimes loosely) try to stick with the "Want Need Wear Read" rule of gifting, and then they each get stocking stuffers and a couple of fun things from Santa.
