Christmas Cookies

I'm about to go to a Christmas cookie exchange at my sister-in-laws house. A cookie exchange isn't something that I'd heard of here in New Zealand until my brother kindly married a lovely Canadian girl. This year (We're into our eighth year) there are seven of us in the exchange and we are all baking an extra dozen for one of our group who couldn't make this time but has had a very rough year. My cookie making nearly turned into a disaster! I baked the cookies (using my ever popular spice biscuit recipe) and they didn’t look that great but this time I had decided to partially coat them with white chocolate to look like snow (the shapes were angels and churches). So I melted the chocolate (haven't done that before and this probably wasn't a good time to start!) and began coating them and they still didn’t look that great and it was very tricky to get the chocolate on them, so I freaked out and decided I should bake cupcakes instead (that's my new specialty and I'm getting quite good at it!). Yes, that’s right I had already made 7 dozen cookies (Well almost 9 dozen but I got distracted and burnt the last tray). Anyhow I didn’t have enough eggs so I argued with Noah (who finished school for the year on December 9th - way too early) to get him to come to the supermarket with me then got to the supermarket wondering how the heck I was going to package a dozen cupcakes for everyone. I got the eggs and some plastic plates and bags after much deliberation. Got home, threw some butter in the mixer to start the cupcakes and then discovered the chocolate had dried on the cookies and I thought maybe I should try one…well they weren’t too bad…quite delicious in fact. So I decided to use them after all that!!

Now the kitchen is a bomb site. There’s still butter in the mixer and 7 dozen (or so) cookies lying around on the bench.

But at least the baking is done.

I've tried to pretty them up in the picture up there with a Mary Englebreit plate, but I'm not sure even Mary can make them look good.

Anyhow, I've packaged them all up in lovely red bags with Christmas tags and soon they'll be out of my house for everyone elses enjoyment, but now it's back to the mess...

I've signed up for this Christmas blog party over here http://prettypetals.typepad.com/ (not too sure how to put links in yet )which hopefully I'll be able to do a post for on the right day, it's tricky when you're at the bottom of the world in a completely different time zone.