Holiday Cookies

I realized my blog is a great way to keep a record of what Christmas cookies I tried out this year, and what I thought of them.

The other day I tested this recipe from a Taste of Home cookie cookbook I have - it's for peanut butter chocolate cookies. Oh my!



First of all, these are not bake 'em and eat 'em right away cookies. These take some time. They are a yummy soft peanut butter cookie with a peanut butter cream cheese dollop on the top. Okay, that right there is heaven. In fact, just hand me a bowl of that peanut butter cream cheese mixture...

So, then you dip the bottoms in chocolate - something you can't really see in the picture. The recipe called for melting chocolate chips for this. As I was melting them and noticing it looked like my chocolate was seizing up despite no drops of water anywhere, I remembered reading recently that chocolate chips often don't work for melting. Oh yea... that happened once when I was making chocolate fondue. Note to self: get melting chocolate next time.

Anyway, I added some half and half to the chocolate which solved the problem. The chocolate drizzle for the top was made with cocoa, and that worked well. Of course I am not so talented when it comes to a delicate drizzle. Mike, on the other hand, was channeling his inner Martha Stewart and did nice star-shaped drizzles on the cookies.

My verdict: these are amazing and absolutely worth the effort. (But they're also good without any of the chocolate!).

On Sunday I got it in my head that making some sandwich cookies with raspberry filling would be an interesting thing to try. I found a few recipes, but ultimately decided that I needed to use my mother-in-law's tried-and-true sugar cookie recipe. It's really the best! So I made some dough and tucked it in the fridge.

Yesterday I went through my cookie cutters, found several stars that worked well together, and here is the result:



The girls call them American Girl cookies because they look a bit like the AG logo. I call them Raspberry Stars. These are yummmmy! Definitely will be making these again next Christmas. I was also thinking if I could find two heart cookie cutters that nested well, these would be fun for Valentine's Day...

Like I need more cookies! ;-)