Improv: Christmas Tree Appetizers

Christmas is just a week away!  Wow!  Are you feeling as harried as I am?  Such a busy time of year.  The recipe I'm sharing with you today is so easy that it will make your holiday entertaining a breeze.

Today is reveal day for the Improv Challenge!

The premise of the Improv Challenge is easy: each month there are two assigned ingredients.  The participants must make a recipe using both ingredients and blog about it.

This month's assigned ingredients were red and green.  Pretty open to interpretation this month.  I had planned to make a fun Christmasy dessert, and unfortunately, waited until the last day to do it (because I wanted to take it to our Advent dinner at church last night).  Well, it didn't turn out so good.  It was edible, but not good enough to take to church or share on the blog.  Womp, womp!  Time for Plan B!  I hopped on Pinterest and found another little goody that contained red and green elements and would be perfect for Christmastime.  Not a dessert this time though.  A savory appetizer.  I ran to the store quickly to get what I needed and whipped these babies up in no time.  I got the idea from Betty Crocker.

Christmas Tree Appetizers

Ingredients:

Pita pocket bread or flatbread

Olive oil (optional)

Pretzel sticks

Guacamole Dip (I used Dean's)

Red bell pepper, chopped finely

Sliced cheddar cheese

Directions:

If you want to toast your pita or flatbread, preheat oven to 400.  Cut pita or flatbread rounds into 8 pieces using a pizza cutter.  Place on a baking sheet.  Brush each piece lightly with olive oil.  Bake for 10-15 minutes, or until bread is toasted and crunchy.  Remove from oven and cool completely.

Place the "trees" on a serving platter.  Break pretzels in half and stick a half into the bottom of each tree.  Spoon a bit of guacamole dip on each one, smoothing it to cover the whole wedge.  Place the chopped red bell pepper on each tree, making a zig-zag swag design, if desired.  Cut the cheddar into small squares and place them on top of each tree like a star.  

Serve and enjoy!

So easy, but everyone is going to love them.  Look how adorable they are!  They will make any Christmas party super festive.  

I didn't give specific amounts in the recipe, because it depends on how many you need. I would plan on two to three trees per guest, depending on how much other food you will be serving.  I used flatbread instead of pita pockets.  The package contained 5 rounds, so that would give you 40 trees from one package.  

You will notice that I used Dean's "guacamole dip" instead of real guacamole.  Since this was "Plan B", I didn't have the time to make my own fresh guacamole.  I thought about buying it pre-made from the deli, but then I remembered the dip (found with the chip dips in the dairy aisle).  The dip is nice because it will not turn brown on you in a matter of minutes like guacamole will.  That's nice if you are having a party where the food will be out all night for people to munch on.  The Dean's brand does have some chunks of tomato in it, but they didn't cause any problem.

You don't have to toast the pita or flatbread if you would rather not.  The Betty Crocker recipe didn't call for it, but I thought it would be nice.  I really liked it with the flatbread being crunchy instead of soft.  Just make sure you let the bread cool completely, or the guacamole dip will melt when you put it on. (Don't ask me how I know this!)

I had first thought of using yellow bell pepper for the "star", but then I saw the sliced cheese and thought that would be easier.  I tried cutting a star shape out of the cheese, but I am horrible at free-handing stuff like that and it looked hideous.  So I went with simple square/diamond shapes instead.

These are not only pretty, but yummy too.  Unfortunately, I don't like bell peppers. so I didn't try any with them on it, but my two daughters did the taste-testing for me and gave them two thumbs up.  I had some without the bell pepper and liked it a lot.  

This will probably be my last post before Christmas, so I would like to wish all of my lovely readers a very Merry Christmas!

Check out all the other red and green goodies below and come back next month to see what I make with pork and rice.

An InLinkz Link-up

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Cinnamon Blondies

Here's a great Christmas dessert for you.  I love blondies.  I have made several different kinds now, and I love them all.  Nothing can beat a great brownie, but I love blondies too because they are so versatile and can be changed up in a million different ways. This is a great blondie for the holiday season. The warm cinnamon flavor is awesome for the fall months as well as around Christmastime. I got the recipe from A Little Bit Crunchy.

Cinnamon Blondies

Ingredients:
1 cup butter
3 cups brown sugar
1 tbsp vanilla
2 eggs + 2 egg yolks
2¼ cup flour
½ tsp salt
4 tsp cinnamon
½ cup cinnamon chips (optional)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°. Coat a 9x13” baking dish with baking spray. Set aside.

In a medium saucepan, melt the butter and brown sugar together over medium-low heat.  Cook for 1 minute, until it starts to bubble around the edges.  Do not let it come to a full boil. Remove from heat and pour into a large mixing bowl.  Let it cool for about 10 minutes.

Add the vanilla, eggs, and yolks and stir well.  Add the flour, salt, and cinnamon and stir until just combined.  Add the cinnamon chips, if desired.

Pour mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 25 minutes.  Let cool before cutting into bars and serving.

Makes 15 bars.

These bars are so yummy.  The buttery caramel flavor is a great base, and the warm cinnamon goes so well with it. I highly recommend using a quality cinnamon (Penzey's has several varieties), and not the cheapo grocery store stuff for this recipe. Since the cinnamon is so prominent, you will really be able to tell a difference.

Have you seen those cinnamon chips at your grocery store? They are with the chocolate chips and other baking chips. Those are really good in these blondies, if you want to add a little bit of texture. I have made them both ways and they are awesome either way.

My favorite thing about these blondies is the top. Do you see how the top is flaky and crackly, like brownies are? I love that. So good.

I have another great Christmas treat coming up for you on Thursday when I post my Improv Challenge recipe for this month.

What I'm Reading Right Now

Mary Poppins

by P.L. Travers

Doctor Sleep

by Stephen King

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Eggnog Coffee Cake

Happy St. Nicholas Day!  Later this afternoon our church is hosting a big St. Nicholas Festival with snacks, crafts, storytime, Irish step dancers, and of course, St. Nicholas himself (played by my husband).  And Christmas caroling in the neighborhood.  It's going to be lots of fun and we hope to see many families from our community.  

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I am totally on board with all things Christmas.  I have already made my favorite Christmas-y dessert, Peppermint Crunch Brownies.  They are so good.  I love anything and everything peppermint and chocolate this time of year.  Another great Christmas flavor is eggnog.  Some people love it, some people hate it, but did you know you don't have to drink it to enjoy it?  I love baking with it.  Remember my Cranberry Eggnog White Chocolate Muffins from a few years ago?  Today I've got another great breakfast goodie starring eggnog that you will love.  I got the recipe from Dinners, Dishes, and Desserts (the glaze is from Mandy's Recipe Box).  

Eggnog Coffee Cake

Ingredients:
1½ cup sugar, divided
1 cup butter, softened, divided
1 cup + 1 tbsp eggnog
1 cup sour cream 
2 eggs
1 tsp almond extract
3½ cups flour, divided
1½ tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
½ cup brown sugar
1 tsp nutmeg
½ cup powdered sugar

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350°. Coat a 9x13” baking dish with baking spray.

In a mixing bowl, cream together 1 cup sugar and ½ cup butter.  Stir in the 1 cup eggnog, sour cream, eggs, and almond extract.  

In a separate bowl, mix together 2½ cups flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.  Add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients, stirring gently until just combined.  Pour batter into the prepared baking dish.

In a small bowl, using a pastry blender or a fork, combine the remaining ½ cup sugar, remaining ½ cup butter, remaining 1 cup flour, brown sugar, and nutmeg.  Sprinkle over the batter.

Bake for 25­35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.  Let cool 20 minutes before adding the glaze.  For the glaze, combine the powdered sugar and remaining 1 tbsp eggnog.  Add more eggnog if necessary to get the desired consistency.  Drizzle over cooled cake.  Serve warm or room temperature.

Makes 15 servings.

This coffee cake is so good.  The eggnog and the sour cream make it so moist and tender.  The eggnog, almond extract, and nutmeg combine to give this such a great holiday taste.  This really is a great holiday treat and would be awesome for Christmas morning. If you want to make it ahead, you can refrigerate it after pouring the batter into the baking dish.  Then in the morning, sprinkle the struesel topping on and bake. 

I am off to bake a bunch of loaves of Irish Soda Bread and a few pans of Irish Cream Brownies for today's St. Nicholas Festival.  I hope you get the chance to bake something fun this weekend!

What I'm Reading Right Now

Mary Poppins

by P.L. Travers

Doctor Sleep

by Stephen King

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Peppermint Crunch Brownies

Are you ready for Christmas?  I hope so, because it's coming up fast!  I have one last recipe for you before the big day.  I get totally obsessed with chocolate peppermint things this time of year.  It's just the perfect combo.  I've made a couple different recipes for peppermint brownies over the years, but this year I perfected them.  I started with this recipe from Julie's Eats and Treats and changed it up slightly.  Here's the recipe for the "perfect" peppermint brownie.

Peppermint Crunch Brownies

Ingredients:

1 box brownie mix

Eggs, oil, and water called for on brownie mix box

1 tsp peppermint extract

½ cup butter, melted

⅓ cup buttermilk

½ cup cocoa

3½ cups powdered sugar

1 cup Andes Peppermint Crunch Baking Chips

Directions:

Prepare brownie mix according to package directions, stirring in the peppermint extract along with the eggs, oil, and water.  Bake according to package directions in a 9x13” pan.

When brownies are almost done, combine butter, buttermilk, and cocoa in a medium saucepan.  Bring to a boil over medium-high heat.  Remove from heat and stir in powdered sugar. 

When brownies are done, remove them from the oven and spread the frosting over them while warm.  Let cool.  Sprinkle on the peppermint bits and press down very lightly to set them in place.  Cut into bars and serve.

Makes 20 brownies.

I don't usually frost brownies, but it really takes these brownies up a notch and makes them more special.  Perfect for Christmas.  You can't really taste the buttermilk in the frosting, but it just gives it a tangy depth of flavor.  

This is what I used for the topping.  Yummy little peppermint bits.  You want to put them on at just the right time.  If you put them on when the brownies and the frosting are still hot, they could melt into it.  The first time I made them, I did that and then put the lid on my dish to take it somewhere.  They were all melty by the time we got there.  But you don't want the frosting to completely cool and set up either.  Then the peppermint bits won't stick and will fall off when you eat them.  

This will most likely be my last post in 2013. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!  

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SRC: Gingerbread Oreo Blondies

It's time for this month's Secret Recipe Club! The Secret Recipe Club is a group of food bloggers who secretly make one of someone else's dishes and post them all on the same day at the same time.  It's really fun, choosing a recipe to make, making the recipe, then reading about everyone else's recipes.  It's a great way to "meet" other bloggers and check out some great blogs that you never knew about before.

This month I was assigned the blog Food Ramblings, written by Elizabeth.  I love her blog!  She has so many great recipes that I want to try.  A couple of savory dinners that caught my eye were her Beef and Tomato Risotto and her French Onion Casserole.  But with the holidays coming up, I was kind more in the mood for dessert.  The first dessert of hers I pinned was her Chocolate Buttermilk Pie.  I make a regular buttermilk pie and was very interested in how a chocolate version would taste.  But then I saw her recipe for Gingerbread Oreo Blondies, and I am all about everything "gingerbread" right now, so that's what I went with.  

Gingerbread Oreos are very hard to find.  I googled it and found out that last year Walmart was the only store to carry them.  My Walmart didn't have them this year.  Shoot!  But I already had my mind set on making these blondies, so I did something I have never done before: I bought food on Amazon.com.  They were selling them as an "add-on" item, so I ordered my daughters some Christmas presents and added on these cookies.  It wasn't until after I received them and went to print out Elizabeth's recipe, that I saw her solution to the availability problem.  She couldn't find them either, but found a similar cookie at Target.  Oops.  I had read that the first time I saw that post, but had (inconveniently) forgotten that part.  Oh well!  

Gingerbread Oreo Blondies

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, melted

2 cups brown sugar

2 eggs, beaten

2 tsp vanilla extract

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

¼ tsp baking soda

½ tsp salt

¼ tsp ground cinnamon

½ tsp ground ginger

¼ tsp ground nutmeg

1 cup white chocolate chips

20 Gingerbread Oreos or Target Brand

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. Spray 9x13 pan with baking spray and set aside.

In a large mixing bowl, combine butter and brown sugar.  Stir in eggs and vanilla.  Dump in the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg.  Mix dry ingredients into wet ingredients until combined.  Stir in the white chocolate chips.

Pour half of the blondie dough into the pan and spread evenly. Press the Oreos on top of the blondie dough, evenly spacing them out.  Using two spoons, place a blob of remaining dough on top of each cookie.  Spray a silicone scraper with Pam and use it to flatten out the dough blobs a little bit.  Don’t worry about the spaces between the cookies; they will fill in with dough as it bakes.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until a fork comes out clean. Allow to cool completely. Cut into squares and serve.

Makes 20 blondies.

Here are a few pics of the process.

 The dough is very thick, so you have to be very careful in spreading it out in the pan.  

 The cookie layer.  I forgot to take a pic of the next step, where I blobbed the dough on top of the cookies and flattened it out.  Sorry!  It's really neat how the cookies just kind of meld into the dough as it bakes.  After it cools on the counter for a while, you can kind of see the lumps where the cookies are, which is really nice because it makes it very easy to cut even portions (something I am always bad at).

They aren't the prettiest things in the world, but after one bite, no one will care what they look like.

Oh my goodness, these were so good it was totally worth the Amazon splurge.  I just love blondies.  I certainly don't have anything against brownies, but there is just something about blondies.  They are so buttery and decadent. And the gingerbread flavor in these is just perfect.  The only thing I changed about Elizabeth's recipe was to increase the ginger in the dough.  She called for 1/8th of a teaspoon, but I love ginger, and since "ginger" is in the title of the recipe, I decided to bump it up a bit.  The cookies are really good on their own too.  I had to try one by itself, of course!  I'm surprised that Oreo doesn't distribute these more, because they are delicious.  If you happen across a package, get one!  (Or two.)  I am definitely going to look for the Target brand too.

These made the perfect dessert for when we had friends over.  They were a hit with the adults and kids alike.  These blondies definitely satisfied my craving for gingerbread-something and they are the perfect dessert for this time of year.  Thanks for a great recipe, Elizabeth!

The Secret Recipe Club is taking a little holiday break, so Group A is taking January off.  We'll be back with another great reveal the first Monday of February.  Merry Christmas to all of my fellow SRC members!

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Fill The Cookie Jar: Reindeer Cookies

Happy December!  Now that we are done with Thanksgiving, I am in full Christmas-y mode.  Perfect timing as today we are all posting Christmas-themed cookies for this month's Fill the Cookie Jar.

This is actually a cookie that I made last year, that I never got around to posting before Christmas.  I got the idea from Caffeine and A Prayer.  I made them for my daughter's preschool class last year and she reported back that they were a big hit with the kids.  Not only are these cookies bound to be loved by kids, but they are great cookies to be made by kids.  They are easy for kids to help with and a lot less messy than decorating sugar cookies!  I did my cookies just slightly different from the original; here's how I did them.

Reindeer Cookies

Ingredients:
Frosting (canned is fine)
Brown food coloring
Nutter Butter cookies
Tiny twist pretzels
Red and brown M&Ms


Directions:
Stir brown food coloring into frosting until it is the approximate shade of the Nutter Butters.  Spread a small glob of frosting on the top of each Nutter Butter and attach two pretzels to make the antlers.  Place two small dollops of frosting and stick on brown M&Ms for the eyes.  Do another small dollop of frosting near the bottom and attach a red M&M for the nose.

Let sit for an hour or so to allow the frosting to harden.  Serve or store in an airtight container for serving the next day.

Makes as many as you like!

If you click through to the original recipe, you will notice two main differences.  She didn't color her frosting for the "glue".  You don't have to do this, but I think it looks better this way.  You don't want that part to stick out so much.  It would be tempting to use peanut butter for this purpose, but it won't harden as much as the frosting, and your antlers, eyes, and noses might not stay on very well.

The other thing I changed was to use two pretzels for the antlers instead of just one.  I think they look more "antler-y" this way.

Aren't they adorable?

Check out all the other great holiday cookies below and happy baking!

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Jingle Bars

Okay, one more quick Christmas dessert before I take some time off for the holiday. These bars are amazing!  I saw them on The Freshman Cook, and couldn't wait to try them. They are very festive with their red and green colors, and they are some of the tastiest bars I've ever had. Let me map these out for you: graham cracker crust, topped with 2 bags of Heath toffee bits, slathered with sweetened condensed milk, and topped with holiday chocolate chips.  They are very rich and probably have a million calories each, so don't make them when you're home by yourself.  But if you do over-indulge on these a little, don't beat yourself up. It's Christmas!

Jingle Bars

Ingredients:

½ cup butter (1 stick), melted

1½ cups graham cracker crumbs

2 (8 oz.) bags Heath Bits O'Brickle Toffee Pieces

1 (14 oz.) can sweetened condensed milk

1 (10 oz.) bag Nestle Toll House Holiday Morsels

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°.  Spray a 9x13” pan with baking spray.  Set aside.

Combine melted butter and graham cracker crumbs and press into the bottom of prepared baking dish.  Top with both bags of Heath toffee pieces.  Pour sweetened condensed milk over toffee pieces.  Smooth out with spoon to make sure it’s evenly distributed.  Sprinkle holiday chocolate chips on the top.  

Bake for 20-25 minutes or until set.  Let cool completely before cutting into bars.

Makes 20 bars.

So festive!  I only wish the holiday chocolate chips were all red and green, without the brown ones.  Would be even prettier.

If it's too late to make these for this Christmas, but you don't want to wait until next Christmas, no worries! Use regular chocolate chips and they are good to go for any time of the year.

I made these for a church potluck a couple of weeks ago.  They were a huge hit!  I sent some home with a family who was there for the church service, but not the meal beforehand.  The mom wrote on my Facebook wall the next day telling me how good they were, and the teenage boys went on and on about them at school the next day (my husband teaches there, so he heard it first-hand).  I think they liked them!

I had one other Christmas recipe to share with you, but it will have to wait until next year, as I am super busy getting ready for the holiday.  I probably won't be back until after New Year's, so I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year!

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Peppermint Chocolate Pudding Pie

Here's another fun Christmas dessert for you.  My absolute favorite Christmas flavor combination is peppermint and chocolate.  I'm the kind of purist who will only get a peppermint mocha at Starbucks between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve.  It's just so yummy and reminds me so much of the Christmas season (prob from my years working at Starbucks!), that I can't ruin it by having it at different times of the year.  I have seen so many peppermint and chocolate goodies floating around the blog world this season and I want to try all of them!  I'm going to have to rename my Christmas board on Pinterest to "Peppermint and Chocolate Recipes".  I saw a pudding pie from Pillsbury that I wanted to try.  It was double-layered with a layer of chocolate pudding on the bottom and some kind of marshmallow peppermint layer on the top.  It sounded good, but I wasn't sure about the marshmallow part.  That sounded kind of weird to me.  So I created my own top layer using white chocolate pudding instead.  I also used a graham cracker crust instead of a traditional pie crust.  Here's how I made mine.

Peppermint Chocolate Pudding Pie

Ingredients:

2¼ cups milk, divided

1 box (4 serving size) cook and serve chocolate pudding mix (not instant)

1 cup semisweet chocolate chips

1 box (4 serving size) instant white chocolate pudding mix

¼ tsp peppermint extract.

1 cup Cool Whip

1½ tsp peppermint sugar or red sprinkles, optional

1 chocolate graham cracker crust

1 candy cane, crushed

Directions:

In a 2 qt. saucepan, stir together the 1¼ cups milk and chocolate pudding mix.  Cook over medium heat as directed on box.  Reduce heat to low; continue cooking while adding chocolate chips, stirring until melted.  Set aside.

Combine the remaining 1 cup milk and white chocolate pudding mix.  Whisk until thick.  Add peppermint extract and Cool Whip.  You can also add sprinkles if desired, but be aware that the color will bleed and it will end up pink instead of white with red specks.

Spread chocolate pudding in the bottom of the graham cracker crust.  Top with white chocolate/peppermint pudding.  Cover and refrigerate until set, about 4 hours.  Just before serving, sprinkle the crushed candy cane over the top.  Cut into 8 wedges and serve.  Store leftovers covered in refrigerator (crushed candy cane will kind of melt into the top, but it’s still good!).

Makes 8 servings.

Isn't it pretty?  This is what it looks like when you first put the crushed candy cane on top.  I did that before I refrigerated it and was surprised to see that the candy cane pieces had melted into the top when I got it out of the fridge.  That's why it looks pink in the top picture.  No worries; it was still delicious!

 I stirred some of these peppermint sprinkles into the white chocolate part and they also melted and turned the filling pink.  Again, didn't matter to us!

This pie is so good!  I love pudding pies, and these two puddings together are amazing.  I love the combination of the chocolate and peppermint.  Perfection!  This is an easy pie to make for your Christmas dinner as long as you have a few hours to chill it before serving.

I have two more Christmas recipes to share with you, but I'm running out of time!  Maybe now that I have my Christmas shopping done I will be able to get those up before the big day.

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Improv Challenge: Jingle Bell Cookie Pizza

Sorry I have been MIA lately.  December is just so busy, and then life threw us a curveball that took us out of town for a few days. But today is the Improv Challenge, and I wasn't about to miss that!

The premise of the Improv Challenge is easy: each month there are two assigned ingredients.  The participants must make a recipe using both ingredients and blog about it.

This month's assigned ingredients were chocolate and marshmallows.  I hope you weren't expecting some crazy savory dish, because there are so many fun Christmas desserts out there right now and I want to try them all!  I saw this Jingle Bell Cookie Pizza in an email from Pillsbury, and thought it would be perfect for this month's challenge.  

Jingle Bell Cookie Pizza

Ingredients:

1 roll (16.5 oz.) refrigerated chocolate chip cookies

1½ cups miniature marshmallows

½ cup red and green M&Ms

½ cup hot fudge topping, heated, if desired

Directions:

Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 12” inch pizza pan with shortening, or spray with cooking spray. 

On pan, break up cookie dough into pieces and press out dough evenly on bottom of pan to form crust. Bake 12 to 14 minutes or until light golden brown.

Sprinkle marshmallows and candies evenly over crust. Bake 2 to 3 minutes longer or until marshmallows are puffed. Drizzle hot fudge topping over top. Cool completely, about 1 hour. Cut into 16 wedges to serve.

Makes 16 servings.

This is such a great holiday dessert because it's so easy and quick to make, but is really fun and festive.  I made it the weekend my mom was up visiting and we all really liked it.  I'm not a big marshmallow fan, but they work really well on this pizza with the M&Ms.

I just love the red and green colors on this dessert.  But you could easily use different colors for different holidays.  I'm thinking the Easter M&Ms would be really fun.  And you could use Reese's Pieces for fall colors at Thanksgiving.

 Gotta love chocolate on top of chocolate on top of chocolate!

 If you need a quick dessert for a small party, give this one a try.  And be sure to check out all of the other chocolate and marshmallow recipes below.  Next month's challenge is bananas and nutmeg; yum!

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Lazy Baker Sugar Cookies

It's the 7th day of the month, which means it's Crazy Cooking Challenge time. 

 This month's theme was sugar cookies.  I wasn't too excited about this because baking isn't my thing, and cookies are my least favorite thing to bake even when I do feel like baking.  And Christmas sugar cookies are the worst kind of cookies because you have to make the dough, refrigerate it for so long, then roll it out with a rolling pin, and cut out all the shapes, blah, blah, blah. I am far too lazy for all that!  I have a serious aversion to any recipe that calls for a rolling pin.  If I read a recipe that I'm interested in and I come across a sentence that starts with, "Roll out. . . "  I immediately move on.  I still wanted to participate this month though, so I started looking through all kinds of sugar cookie recipes for a "cheaters" version.  I found it at Lulu The Baker.  She calls them "No Chill, No Roll Sugar Cookies".  Sounded good to me!  And they looked cute and could still be easily decorated, so that was the recipe for me.  I got the frosting recipe from her too.  I'm calling them "Lazy Baker Sugar Cookies."  I had never done the whole baking-sugar-cookies-and-decorating-them thing with my two girls, so we made an afternoon of it.  

Lazy Baker Sugar Cookies

Ingredients:

½ cup butter, softened

½ cup shortening

1 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla

1 egg

2½ cups flour

¾ tsp salt

1 tsp baking powder

2 tbsp milk

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350°. 

In a large bowl, cream butter, shortening, and sugar until fluffy. Add vanilla and egg; mix. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, salt, and baking powder. Add dry ingredients to butter/sugar and combine. Add milk and stir until completely incorporated. 

Roll dough into tablespoon-sized balls and place on a greased baking sheet. Bake for 12-14 minutes, until cookies are just beginning to turn golden on the edges. Remove from oven and cool completely before frosting.

Frosting:

Combine 1 stick softened butter, 1 tsp vanilla, 4 cups powdered sugar, and 2-4 tbsp milk. Beat until fluffy.  Add food coloring as desired.

Makes 3½ dozen (2”) cookies.

The only change I made to the cookie recipe was that I changed ½ tsp baking soda to 1 tsp baking powder because I went to put in the baking soda and found I was out. Whoops!  My husband was working and there was no way I was dragging my two kids to the store just for that, so I tried using the baking powder instead, and they came out perfectly.  I know that baking powder isn't a substitute for baking soda, but since it worked, I'm going with it!

I love how the cookies turned out.  Perfectly round, soft, but not so soft that they fell apart.  I used my Pampered Chef stoneware and they were perfectly cooked without browning at all.  

Here are the pics of my two little girls helping me make these cookies.  Lena (4 and a half) in the blue shirt, and Eva (2 and a half) in the pink.

Eva helping me mix the dough.  

Lena's turn.

Eva is the type who does not like anything on her hands.  After she rolled her first cookie, she waved her hands in my face, saying "dirty, dirty, dirty!"  She wanted me to wash them in between each cookie roll.

Can you tell which ones I rolled, which ones Lena rolled, and which ones Eva "rolled"?

I set up four different colors of frosting: white, red, green, and brown.  The brown was for the little reindeer kit I got.  I used food coloring to make the brown, then afterwards it hit me that I should have just used cocoa powder.  Duh!

The reindeer kit.  I think our cookies were a bit small for it, but oh well.

Waiting patiently to begin.

Eva and her first cookie.

Cute, and tastes good too!

Sampling the artwork.

My reindeer cookie.  I used chocolate sprinkles to make it look furry.

Lena and her reindeer cookie.

This is how a 2-year-old does sprinkles.

My husband jumped in after he was done working and made a couple too.  He made the wreath at the top.  I made the Christmas tree, the red bow on green background, and the white with red swirls.  Eva's are the ones with bites out of them.

The prettiest ones.  

The red sprinkles were cinnamon-flavored and the red-and-white ones were peppermint-flavored.

Here are all of the ones that we made.  Lena made all of the ones with mounds of blue sprinkles, because blue is her favorite color.

The mess we created.  Holy moly!  My lovely husband offered to do clean-up.  What a saint!

I had lots of fun making these cookies with my kids.  This will definitely be my go-to recipe for sugar cookies from now on.  

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