baking-palooza 2013

Due to family commitments, I lost a weekend of holiday prep time this year. So rather than happening on a full, exhausting, reeeeally looooong day like in years past, "Baking-palooza 2013" was split into three shorter, waaaay less exhausting nights in my super awesome kitchen. (Hey, baking is the only thing I really do in there consistently other than make tea at the stove and pour Cape Cods at the bar ;)

To get everything done, I was a pre-planning machine, prepping dough that needed to chill overnight (chocolate crinkles), or baking things that needed to cool before being decorated (Rudolph sugar cookies :) as part of the previous night's bake-fest. The result was a much happier, less tired out me AND some really cute desserts combined my annual holiday faves :)

Rudolph Sugar Cookies

I saw these on Pinterest a month or so ago and thought, for decorated sugar cookies (which are usually a pain), this design actually looked attainable with my limited decorating skills... and I was right! These were super-easy to decorate and came out super cute (IMHO). I will admit that I totally cheated and used refrigerated dough on these though -- not enough time or energy to make sugar cookies from scratch this year. 

Peanut Blossoms

I make these a few times a year now... cuz I also totally cheat on these and use peanut butter cookie mix. But I figure that's allowed since I have to work to quickly open up dozens of individually-wrapped Hershey's Kisses to press into the hot-out-of-the oven cookies. 

Chocolate Dipped Pretzels
My goal was to make white-chocolate dipped pretzels with pretty holiday colored sprinkles. But I ended up burning my Ghirardelli white chocolate chips (which smelled oddly like smore's while burning...). So leftover Hershey's Kisses were sacrificed to hold my pretty sprinkles on pretzel rods. I haven't actually eaten one of these yet. Hope they taste good :)

The Annual Faves: Chocolate Crinkles and Snickerdoodles
People at my holiday party would revolt if I didn't make theses cinnamon-y Snickerdoodles. And I think the Chocolate Crinkles (from my Aunt Trudi's recipe) are super fun to make cuz they're so messy. I made these smaller than normal this year and finally got the promised amount of cookies out of Trudi's dough recipe... it only took like a decade for me to realize that ;)