little black journal

I spent this afternoon baking up a storm, preparing all kinds of goodies to take with us when we head down to Portland later this week to spend Christmas with my family.  I love using the holidays as an excuse to try out new cookie recipes, and so I scoured the internet to find a couple of sophisticated-but-simple treats. This is what I came up with:

Cranberry Noels (recipe here, courtesy of Martha):

This one seemed simple enough, and once I had my dough all rolled out and packed away in the fridge, I figured slicing the rolls into perfect little circles and dropping them on a cookie sheet would be a piece of cake.  Not so much…  My dough was really crumbly, so when I tried to slice it, it fell apart.  But I’ll be danged if I’m going to let two whole sticks of butter go to waste, so I had to just hand-form the dough into little patties and for-go any hopes of matching Martha’s perfectly round biscuits.  Ah, well.  They still taste good…

Chocolate-Espresso Snowcaps (recipe here, also from Martha):

Espresso and chocolate, coming together in one perfect cookie?  Yes, please!  Between the sifted ingredients, the melted chocolate, the goopy mixing bowl, and the sugar-dipping bowl, this one made a disaster of my kitchen, but it was worth it.  Freezing the dough before rolling it into balls was key, as it was far too sticky to work with right out of the bowl.  I used Starbucks Via instead of instant espresso, and the cookies have a distinct-but-not-overpowering coffee flavor.  Yummy.

And finally, because it’s tradition, one more batch of butter toffee.  Not sure what happened to the batch I made last weekend – we must have an infestation of toffee-gnomes in our kitchen…

Our bundle of goodies is now safely packed away, ready to be broken into on Christmas Eve with the family.  Dude, I love Christmas…