Giant Christmas Sugar Cookies

Shhhhh.... don't tell anyone, but I kinda cheated on my Christmas sugar cookies this year. Instead of making 100's of individual rolled & cutout shapes, I baked large sheets of cookies, put them on big, 18"x25" trays and covered them with copious amounts of buttercream icing. (Sorta like a sheet cake, I guess.) On the top, I piped MERRY CHRISTMAS in more frosting and added a cardstock cutout of Santa making a snow angel in the corner. Then I dusted powdered sugar over the whole thing. I'm going to put a knife beside the trays, and let everyone cut off as much or as little as they want.

I must be getting old. Or lazy. Or both. For the last couple of years, I've been devising ways of simplifying my Christmas cookies. Don't get me wrong, I love being the designated sugar cookie baker for our families. But when you have to travel hundreds of miles in a small car and need to make enough to feed 50+ people... you gotta get creative to keep your sanity. 

I'm pleased with how these turned out. And I was especially happy to cut my baking and decorating time in half. I ended up making 4 giant trays of cookies. Tomorrow we'll pack them in our "sleigh" and travel west to share them with family.

Here's hoping your holidays are sweet!

Here's a few photos of the baked cookie sheets and the first layer of buttercream icing.

George Strait said it best.

I sure do like those Christmas cookies, sugar.

As the designated cookie-baker for my family, I always try to come up with a theme for my holiday treats. This year, I decided to bake one of the lyrics to George Strait's song: Christmas Cookies. Mostly because I wanted to surprise my brother, Kevin. He's a pretty phenomenal singer too, and this year, he professionally recorded a CD of Christmas tunes. Of course, Christmas Cookies was my favorite song on the album.

My brother, Kevin - singer & cookie-eater extraordinaire.

As you can see, it didn't take long for the nieces and nephews to eat their way through the batch. And make up some new words with the remaining letters.

Nephew, Tayler, rearranging the letters.

Bea, enjoying her mom's cookies.

Ice Skating Penguin Cookies

It's cookie-baking-palooza at our house.  Cookies for school parties. Cookies for office get-togethers. Cookies for family holiday gatherings. Cookies. Cookies. Cookies.

I made these ice skating penguin cookies for an office party at WSU this week. I used my favorite, simple, Kansas Sugar Cookie recipe, frosted with a light blue, lemon-y royal icing. The penguins are made from black licorice jelly beans. I added white chocolate eyes, bellies and skates, and used orange Nerd candies for the itty bitty beaks. If you look closely, you can see the little skate marks on the frosting "ice."

They made a fun & festive addition to our potluck party table.

* FYI... I made more of these for our family Christmas gatherings and couldn't find any more black jelly beans for the penguins, so I used Junior Mints instead. They were just as cute, and even more refreshing!

Cheery, Cherry Gingerbread Man Tarts

I'm not a huge, gingerbread-lover. But when I thought of this idea - to make little hand-held, gingerbread man pies - I never imagined how delicious these two flavors would be together. Gingerbread + cherry = AWESOME! Especially warm. 

I call them Gingerbread Man Tarts, because they're more like a Poptart, than a true pie. Pies have lots of chunky filling. This filling is more puréed. I tried making these the first time using whole cherry pie filling, and they turned out more like Tumor Men - a little too lumpy and bumpy. Trust me, not very appetizing. Kind of comical, actually. But the second time, I put my pie filling in the food processor to make it smooth and lump-free, and it worked perfectly. I think cherry preserves would work really great too.

If you want to make some yourself, check out my recipe and how-to photos at SheKnows.com. The gingerbread crust is really easy to make. (Pie crust in general kind of intimidates me, but not this none. It's fool proof.)

They tasted better than they looked.

I had good intentions of making some cute & clever, woodland animal sugar cookies for Christmas last week, but my heart just wasn't in it. After I baked the 12 or so dozen cookies on Tuesday, the idea of frosting all of them seemed overwhelming - along with the 100 other things that needed to be done before Christmas. Ugh. So needless to say, these are not my finest creations. Martha Stewart would not be impressed. But they tasted good. I should know, I think I ate a dozen squirrels myself.

Halfway through Christmas Eve (and at least 3 gallons of Jingle Juice cocktails later), the cookie messages started getting re-arranged by the 23 Weishaars who had gathered at my brother's house. Good thing it stopped before things got X-rated.