Chocolate Crinkles Are Done!

I'm finished with baking 5 dozen Chocolate Crinkles for the Cookie Exchange. They turned out okay. No major flaws and they taste pretty good. 

But what a mess!

Chocolate Crinkles and Mug Shots

Our homeschool group is having their annual Christmas Mug and Cookie Exchange tonight. I'm pretty excited about it this year. This will be the 1st time that I plan to attempt baking cookies for the exchange.  You see, I am not the baker in the family. . . my daughter is. But now that she's in a charter high school and is busy studying for midterms I am going to attempt to make her famous Chocolate Crinkles myself. Here is a picture of Bethany's beautiful babies:

I mixed up the dough last night and it is now thoroughly chilled. I plan to bake them this morning. Wish me luck!  I'll be sure to post an update. Oh, and the recipe for these delectable delights can be found here.

Our mug exchange is always interesting. We do it "round robin" style. Everyone draws numbers. The 1st person picks out a mug. The 2nd person can take hers or pick one out for herself. And so on. It can be awfully infuriating   a lot of fun. The key is to not fall in love with your initial selection because most likely someone is going to swipe it from you when it it their turn. The only time I came home with the mug that I absolutely adored was when I selected this baby:

 

Isn't this a fun mug! I love it! Now once you take your mug home, whenever you use it you are to say a prayer for the person who gave it. I've said many prayers for the giver of this boot!

Of course, I want to be the giver of a popular mug. . . I need all the prayers I can get! This is the mug that I selected to purchase after searching high and low:

I found it at 10,000 Villages, a fair trade retailer that works with artisans from around the world. It's from Nepal. I'm loving the bamboo detail. Hopefully someone will covet this mug and use it often. 

Anyhow, I will be back later to post photos of my cookies. I hope they turn out as well as Bethany's.

What I Did This Past Weekend

I don't bake. Don't get me wrong...I LOVE to cook. It's just that my talents don't cover the realm of pastries, pies, cakes and cookies. With that in mind I decided to test out some snowflake cookie cutters I purchased last year for next to nothing during the after Christmas sales. 1st I had to decide upon a recipe. I am a frequent purveyor of http://www.allrecipes.com/ and came upon The Best Rolled Sugar Cookie recipe. It has an average 4.5 out of 5 star rating with almost 2000 reviews. So I plunged in. Took me an hour to get everything mixed on Friday afternoon and into the fridge the dough went to chill.

Since I am off so very few weekends I had to figure out when I'd have the time to roll out and bake these cookies. I decided Saturday morning was best. I started working the dough and cutting cookies at 9:00a.m. 3 and 1/2 hours later I'm still at it. These snowflakes were driving me nuts. The small ones kept tearing and the large ones were obviously time consuming. The dough wasn't very cooperative either. Finally I just rolled a few and put them in the oven while I rolled a few more. They expanded a touch during the baking process so some of my intricate designs were no longer that intricate. Oh well, at least this part was over.

Christmas shopping, a choir concert and a sleepover took up the rest of the day. Mass, packaging gifts, more Christmas shopping and a Carolina Panther game was on the agenda for Sunday. Sunday evening around 8:00p.m. was the only time slot available to ice these snowflakes.

Icing the cookies was another battle. I, again, went to trusted Allrecipes and found one that I had all the ingredients for called Butter Icing for Cookies. It included confectioner's sugar, butter, cream and vanilla. Simple, right? After following directions EXACTLY what I had was a mess. The icing hardened up really quickly, wouldn't spread.I even tried "piping" the icing but again, just a crumbly mess. HELP! I went back to Allrecipes and posted my plea on the Recipe Exchange board. Within minutes I had many suggestions: some suggested adding a little more cream while others instructed me to keep the icing over low heat and to stir continuously between cookies. I still had rotten luck. I ended up adding a LOT more cream and using the icing as a "glaze" into which I dipped the cookies. When the icing ran low, I drizzled the rest over the remaining snowflakes. I was finally finished 3 hours after I began.

The snowflake cookies actually turned out quite pretty and tasted yummy. Would I do this again? NO WAY! I do not have the patience for this type of cookie baking. If you all have a simple cookie recipe to send my way I'm game! Feel free to share in my comments section.

I'm off to deal with more deck issues. An update will be given sometime this week, I promise!