Cookies Continued

I had help this year with the cookie bake-a-thon. My best friend from High School, Greg, happened to be in town for meetings on Friday and came to the house to bake cookies on Saturday. We literally baked from 8am to midnight. Greg thought he was going to get a break from his non-stop travel, a relaxing day at the house in front of the fire, but no - I put him to work!

We do have a tradition of making Christmas cookies together. When we were in law school in New Hampshire, Greg was only an hour and a half away in Boston so he'd come up and we would beak in my 10 square foot kitchen. Good times.

By the end of the day on Saturday we were ready to collapse and could not stomach the thought of anything sweet ever again. Well, maybe not until Sunday.

Here is a photo of Mom's peanut butter fudge - we make this every year. It is so yummy that Koo came over to the house to join us for dinner two hours after arriving from Salt Lake simply because we had three batches of fudge made.

Here's the recipe:

In a saucepan, combine 2 cups evaporated milk and 4 cups sugar. Cook while stirring with a wooden spoon until it reaches soft ball stage. Remove from heat and add one jar of peanut butter and a teaspoon of vanilla. Stir until smooth and then whip with the spoon until it snaps. Pour into a buttered 9 X 13 pan and let cool.

There's Greg in the background washing dishes. We washed a lot of dishes. I no longer have any fingernails.
We decided we were making too many tan cookies and we needed some color on the plate. Our solution was to whip up four batches of sugar cookies. These are a bit labor intensive.

Calvin was not very good at cutting out the shapes with the cookie cutter. He always cut into another cookie!
Here he is being sneaky and eating some of the dough.

Oh, there's Max joining him.

These are Scandinavian Almond Bars. They are another staple at Christmas season. Sooooo delicious! Make a double batch - you'll be happy you did!

Yum! Almond Bars and sugar cookies!

See Greg in the background? He is putting the frosted cookies out on the back porch to set up. Cold weather is very useful with cookie making!

We frosted 1/2 of the cookies with a lemon juice glaze. When we made another batch of glaze, we added peppermint extract which turned out to be pretty strong. Greg started affectionately calling them "mint bombs".
Here's the finished plates. The ones with the jam in the center are a new recipe we tried from the Barefoot Contessa. One batch of dough calls for 3 sticks of butter so you know they must be good! Here is the recipe. Sadly we did not plan ahead and buy enough jam for the amount of cookies we made so we had to get creative. Things to know: apple-cinnamon jelly just runs out and is yucky. Homemade strawberry freezer jam is too runny and the finished product looks like a bleeding eyeball. Guava jelly is excellent as is current jelly. Your kids squeezable smuckers strawberry jam will work in a pinch!

The yellow filled ones are a Lemon Tassie - a new recipe we tried from Martha's kitchen. Um, YUM! They have lemon zest in the crust and in the filling and are delicious! We made 48 plates and delivered them on Sunday to our neighbors and friends. One project down, about 7 to go!