Baking Christmas Cookies

I am in a cookie exchange with 3 friends from work. We are each making 8 dozen cookies (4 dz of 2 different cookies). We will take our goodies to work on Thursday and exchange 1 dozen of each cookie with each person. We will end up with one dozen of eight different cookies.

Boy, that sounds complicated, doesn't it? LOL.

This is the first time I have been in a cookie exchange and let me tell you, I didn't think it would be this much work!

I definitely picked the wrong cookie to make (Almond Raspberry Sandwich cookies--they have almond paste in the cookie & seedless raspberry jam in the middle). It took me 4 hours just to make the cookies. I have not actually sandwiched them together yet (just the one in the picture so I could try them). They are pretty good although a bit crunchier than I expected. I will put them all together Wednesday evening so that they will look nice when I take them to work.

Since these cookies require two cookies to make one cookie, I had to make 8 dozen instead of 4. That was a lot of rolling and cutting out.

I did learn something valuable during the experience, though. . . All silicone baking liners are NOT created equal. Recently I was in Wally's World and bought a set of two because they seemed so reasonably priced. Well, you get what you pay for. I opened the oven and was shocked to see this

which caused my cookies to turn up in odd ways. NOT GOOD.

Here is a Silpat (a wonderful liner!). See how flat it stayed?


Moral of the story? DON'T waste a dime of your hard-earned cash on Walmart's silicone liners.

Now I am working on Coconut macaroons drizzled with chocolate.
Oh, so much easier than the first ones.

I have the last batch in the oven and then I will melt the chocolate and drizzle them.

In between baking the two kinds of cookies, I had to run to Walmart to buy coconut. While there I spotted these Danskin pullover tops marked down to $5. Well, who could resist a bargain like that? Not me! I bought three of them in different colors.