Yep. It’s time to bake the Christmas cookies!
SO many yummy, crunchy and gooey options to add to them!
I love having a variety of cookies to give out to friends and neighbors, but I hate ‘waiting by the oven’ for the time to ‘ding’. I tried a different method this year, and made my cookies ‘assembly line’ style . . . as I do with my crafting.
I bought a new set of baking sheets at Costco, so now I have FIVE ‘good’ cookie sheets. (got rid of the ‘bad’ ones when I moved earlier this year) So with five cookie sheets to work with, I could easily keep the oven full of baking cookies all the time.
I mixed up all my cookie doughs the day before, wrapped them in a roll in freezer paper and put them in the frig overnight. Wrote the baking time and temp on the freezer paper. Pulled them out about 30 minutes before I was ready to start baking, but my kitchen is SO SMALL, I didn’t have any available counter space to put the tray! And where oh WHERE was I going to put the trays while the cookies cooled?!?!?
Fortunately my garage door (the ‘side’ door, not the BIG door) is four steps away from my kitchen, and it was nice and cool in there. And my chest freezer, washer and dryer are right there at the back of the garage. Made for the perfect cookie cooling station!
Turned my oven on the pre-heat, then lined all my cookie sheets with parchment paper. Grabbed my first roll of dough and a knife and started slicing. By the time I had them sliced and on the cookie sheet, the oven was ready to use. In went the first batch; timer set for 8-10 minutes.
WHILE those were baking, I grabbed my second roll of dough and sliced it up and put slices in the cookie sheet. Timer went off for the first batch. Pulled them out and put the next batch in and set the timer again. Took the ‘hot from the oven’ sheet of cookies to the garage to cool, and grabbed my next roll of dough to slice.
Pulled the second batch from the over, and put the third batch in. Second batch to the garage to cool and first batch was ready to be moved from the cookie sheet to the cooling racks. Grabbed the fourth roll . . . . and so on!
Just kept that process going for a total of 7 batches. (small batches, so just one sheet per batch, but there are BIG baking sheets and will hold 24 cookies).
Sugar cookies with crushed peppermint. (Yes, you can buy bags of crushed peppermint! So much easier than crushing your own!) Sugar cookies topped with ‘thin mints’; raspberry and orange.
Buttery caramel cookies (the caramels come in chocolate chip size!) in front and chocolate mint squares in back (with chocolate and green mint chips)
Chocolate chip peanut butter cookies.
Peanut butter Butterfinger cookies on the left. (again you can BUY a bag of crushed Butterfinger) Pumpkin chip pecan cookies on the right.
After they all completely cooled, I packaged them up in cute little Christmas tins that I found at Dollar Tree; one big tin topped with a smaller one and tied up with some red and white bakers twine. (forgot to take a picture of them all packaged)
And MY Christmas baking is DONE!
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