Baking Night

Every year, Isabel and I pick a night in mid-December to bake until we run out of butter. Then we package the cookies and cakes as gifts. 

We did well this year, though nothing like this. I think our palette was a little drab.  

Anyway, here's what we made, starting with the brown cookie on top  of the Christmas tree and moving clockwise:

Essential Chewy Oatmeal Cookies (King Arthur Cookie Book) Worthy and unsurprising.

Coconut macaroons (King Arthur) Great.

Brewer's Blondies (Baked) These are kind of exciting because they contain chopped up Whoppers. 

Baked Bars (Baked) Layer after layer of delicious things (graham crackers, nuts, chocolate, coconut) that are destroyed by a heavy application of artificial-tasting butterscotch chips and a tsunami of sweetened condensed milk. Vile. If I actually have the nerve to present these as gifts, I am going to enclose a disclaimer.

Essential Sugar Cookies (King Arthur). Isabel's perennial favorite. Even when baked they retain the flavor of raw cookie dough.

Gingerbread (Cookies Unlimited) The usual.

 

Freckled Fruit Shortbread (King Arthur) Excellent.

Chocolate chip cookies (Baked) The usual.

Mother Kroll's lebkuchen (Joy of Cooking) Citron, spice, lemony icing. Would like to know more about Mother Kroll.

The cut-out cookies in the middle are Alice Waters' butter cookies and they are, of course, perfect. Do you think I can say that the kids applied the garish decorations when in fact they didn't?

 

We also made two kinds of fruitcake, but they didn't fit on the plate.