Christmas Cookies

This week, the boy and I spent a night baking and decorating Christmas cookies. Although I try to make this a yearly tradition, I don't have special recipes for the cookies or icing that I use each time. I usually just look around the web until I find one that sounds interesting. This year, I stumbled upon this recipe for the cookies and decided to try it because of the almond extract -- which I LOVE. Before even baking the cookies, we were in smitten! This recipe will definitely be saved and most likely become part of a yearly tradition.

For the icing, I was going to try the recipe on the same site as the cookies, but couldn't find meringue powder so I searched for a different royal icing recipe.  I found this one from Alton Brown and picked it mainly because I had all the ingredients on hand. It was so-so and probably won't be a repeat, but was really easy to throw together and definitely has not kept me from having a cookie -- or two, or three -- each night.

So, after we baked up our cookies and whipped up the icing, we chose to color a third of the icing red, a third green, and leave a third white.  Although our red looked red while mixing, it quickly turned into a very bright, hot pink!  Still looks cute on the cookies, just a little less traditional :) We put the three colors in Ziploc bags and cut a small opening in the corner so we could pipe them onto each cookie.

Boyfriend has not done this in many many years and was fascinated by the Ziploc bag trick. 

We just kept on going until we had plates full of cookies! Along the way, we 'tested' the broken or deformed ones and approved of their quality :)

To top off the Christmas-y, fun-filled night, we took the puppies and drove around looking at Christmas lights.  It was one of the most fun ways to spend a weeknight! 

Hope everyone else is getting their fill of holiday activities before they fly by!