Christmas Cookie-Palooza

I love this time of year.
I love Christmas.
I love Christmas cookies.
I even love baking Christmas cookies - but not every night and all the time.
I love having a random assortment of Christmas cookies to bring to parties and to have out when people come to visit.
I hate taking multiple nights and multiple days to bake and to clean up 12 times.

One of my friends works at a camp and offered to have us all out to camp (BIG KITCHEN & LOTS of ovens) to have a Christmas cookie baking palooza.


Goals:

• to make copious amounts of Christmas cookies
• to only have to clean up a kitchen once
• to hang out with friends

We each planned a couple of Christmas cookies and brought the supplies we needed. We purchased as a group: flour, sugar, etc....... and we met up at Camp.



I had premade my dough because it all said that it needed to chill for several hours before using it. I made a pinwheel cookie as well as spritz cookies. My problem for the day was that my dough got "too cold" and was hard to work with so I had to let it warm up a bit before I could bake mine. It was fine because I got to help other folks make their cookies.

It was a marvelous morning. I now have several dozen cookies of a variety of flavors and I am thankful to be done with my holiday baking (although I am a little nervous my husband is going to eat a large portion of the cookies and cut down on the amount that I have to share with others- I suppose worse case when mom comes up in a week and a half I can bake more and she can snuggle Lucy.

Christmas Cutout Cookies

 I know I mentioned it yesterday in my weekend recap that Marc made a ton of Christmas cookies, but when I started looking at my pictures I decided this needed it's own post due to its massiveness. Sooo many stinkin cookies. I really can take minimal credit for what happened in terms of the Christmas cutout cookies for the day after Thanksgiving. Marc gets about 90% of the credit minus that while he was focused and working I was on baby entertainment duty. I did make the dough for Marc last weekend - while it would have been nice to make it last week but due to the nature of the recipe and it's requirements to have the dough chill for 72 hours before using it as well as needing a bajillion cups of flour and soften butter and and and and and and and and blah blah blah I needed to get it done last weekend due to our nutso schedule this past week. As noted in a few of these pictures Lucy is currently our photo prop for sizing purposes (yes, she is small, but still works well for size comparisons). Lucy really didn't sit on the island and watch Marc roll out cookies for more than about two minutes and then she was over it - plus a part of me was slightly nervous she'd babble and spit all over the dough or for the first time in her life projectile vomit all over the dough.

 

Marc worked for ELEVEN HOURS baking all of these cookies between Saturday and Sunday. I cannot imagine working on cookies for that long. Hanging out with Lucy was a MUCCCHHHH better deal. All of the cookies the Marshall's use are one of two shapes (I am not 100% certain why the lack of diversity in shape of cutout cookies for Christmas, but according to Marc this is the way they have ALWAYS done it - so I just quit asking questions) they use a Santa head and a full Santa carrying his bag shape. The Santa heads get cut out WAY faster than the full Santa shape - it is a fine balance to get them both cut out semi-evenly when the desire is to just cut Santa heads.

This last picture is purely for size comparison - look at how many stinkin cookies this is! I really have a couple concerns:

• How to transport them to ensure they don't break during our seven hour drive?
• How long is it going to take everyone to frost these? Don't get me wrong I like frosting cookies as much as the next person but uffdah!
• How are we going to manage to get these frosted with 2 toddlers running around and 2 babies?

There will be a frosting post coming after Thanksgiving - I am sure I will have tons of pictures from that ordeal.


Does your family have any traditions around Thanksgiving every year?
Do you like frosting cookies?