Every year all of the woman on my Mother’s side of the family come together for our annual Christmas cookie bake. As the years, have passed the number of people baking have only increased along with the growth of our family. It’s a day where our family comes together, it may seem silly that what we’re coming together over is cookies, but the day is never dull. The day begins before we even arrive to our cookie baking venue. We spend the week before searching for the cookies we want to make. We check our family recipe books and make a multitude of Pinterest searches all to find the perfect cookie combinations. We pack up our car with the electric mixer (might I add that is about 20 pounds), the ingredients for all the cookies you could think of, and of course a ton of snacks.

The day begins with the unpacking of all the ingredients. Every family brings their own mixers and ingredients, for every family makes their own set of cookies. The day begins with lots of mixing. We make the dough for nearly all our cookies, some even go in the freezer for a fast cool. We bake at our Aunt Judy’s house and her dual ovens make for lots of baking. Even with both ovens we often found ourselves fighting over oven space. With 17 different kinds of cookies, everyone was in need of the oven, often at different temperatures. This year my mom, sister and I made some different cookies then our usual crop. We made butter pecan cookies, marshmallow cloud cookies, snicker doodles, spritzer cookies, cream cheese raspberry thumbprints, chocolate chip cookies, Amish cookies, and baklava cookies. This was only a sampling of our grand total of 17 cookies all together. I have attached the links for some of the recipes at the bottom of my article.

With all of our success, there is always a fail. This year it came with the chocolate chip cookies. We simply follow the recipe on the back of the tollhouse chocolate chips. There aren’t many ingredients and they’re typically very easy to make. We make much more elaborate cookies, with multiple steps and rolling and dipping. The trouble with these seemingly easy cookies is the socialization of cookie baking day. We are all having fun and catching up that sometimes an ingredient can be left out. When my Aunt Judy took these chocolate chip cookies out of the oven they looked more like small chocolate chip cakes, they did not taste so delicious though. After several different chef taste testers and even an uncle who came to taste as well, we discovered the cookie dough was missing some white sugar. Luckily, we were able to fix the remaining dough and make some delicious chocolate chip cookies for our second batch. Of course, this small cookie catastrophe ended with lots of laughs and a good story to tell to our dad when we got home. Our annual cookie baking day, is one of my favorite days of the year. Especially this year, getting to see all of my family after being away at college this semester.

Here are the links to some of our successful cookies this year:

http://pin.it/bslJf8J

http://pin.it/Uah_npx

https://www.verybestbaking.com/recipes/18476/original-nestle-toll-house-chocolate-chip-cookies/?recipeBrand=tollhouse&gclid=CLyN4JWal9ECFVMvgQodPQAI5Q&gclsrc=aw.ds&dclid=CJak7JWal9ECFUMGgQod-UgF-w