December 19th

I'm embarrassed to post this story and REALLY ashamed about the photo ... but, it helps to illustrate the culinary disaster that took place yesterday. For those of you who don't know, my mom makes the most amazing Christmas cookies on the planet and my sister and I try to copy her recipe most every year. This year was no exception. I gathered all my ingredients and was ready to roll (literally).

Chris picked up unsalted butter instead of regular - I figured there couldn't be a huge difference, right. Then, I added the vanilla extract except when I looked at the bottle I realized it was expired - how could vanilla (or anything else in the spice cabinet) expire? Weird. Now, cardinal rule #1 happens to be that you NEVER use an electric mixer on cookie dough - it makes it stiff. So, I didn't technically use a mixer, I used a food processor and just dumped everything in to save time - so much more convenient!

I have no idea where my Christmas cookie cutters are, so I used the only one I could find which happens to be heart-shaped. My family simply needs to use their imagination here ... picture sweet, tiny stars, trees and stockings.

I refrigerated the dough overnight and started to try and roll it out. Whoa - either something had gone terribly wrong with the recipe, or I hadn't been working out enough. I pulled a muscle in my upper arm but carried on like a trooper.

Finally, after all the cookies were baked and cooled, I started on the frosting. Since I'd tossed the stone-age vanilla earlier, I had to use an extract of another sort. My sister said to use almond - not smart. The frosting crystallized as soon as it hit the cookie so the sprinkles refused to stick. I got the bright idea to just MIX the sprinkles in the warm frosting - really not smart. In the end, it looked like an elf had gotten violently ill and didn't clean up after himself.

So, the batch you see above plus another 24 cookies are going out to the birds & squirrels. I'm not sure they're hungry enough to indulge, but we'll see.