Notes from a Nester: COOKIES!!!

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A blogumn by Debra Barlow

It’s December, folks, and that can mean only one thing: the holiday season has begun!  My husband and I were in Napa for Thanksgiving and sure enough, by Friday night all the little towns had their holiday lights up.  I felt so festive driving around.  But after the grueling drive back to Los Angeles, my holiday spirits were slightly dampened until we were sorting through the mail and found our first Christmas card (thanks to Lindsay for kicking off the season for me!).  After that I gave in to the holiday cheer. And that means…cue the little drummer boy…it’s time for every nester’s favorite holiday pastimes – baking and decorating!

I’m debating doing any decorating this year simply because we’ll be out of town for the holidays, but I may be persuaded to haul out a little holly.  But I have big plans for baking. Between parties, office gifts and one very competitive charity bake sale, I plan to be spending a lot of time with my Kitchenaid mixer over the next two weeks.  And chief among the things I’ll be baking are several recipes from the Martha Stewart Cookies cookbook.

As a foodie, I love cookbooks. Most of the time I buy them off the sale racks at Barnes and Noble, flip through them and never cook a single thing out of them.  I didn’t buy the Martha Stewart book.  It was a gift from my friend over at Sew Girly Alterations (who has no affiliation with Martha, just to be clear).  After a quick flip through the book, there were already three or four things I knew I had to try immediately.  Even now, I’m having trouble narrowing down my baking list to three or four varieties.  The main culprit is the full color picture index at the front of the book.  Maybe I never would have thought about making her snickerdoodles, since I have a reliable and crowd-pleasing recipe of my own, but in the picture they looked so soft and cake like, I had to try them!  And they are so soft and so cake like.  I baked a dozen or so in a mini-muffin tin and they turned out like tiny cupcakes!

Next up on the agenda are cream cheese walnut cookies and chocolate pretzels.  And maybe some chewy chocolate ginger cookies.*  Point is, it’s hard to decide and now that the temperature is falling and the trees are going up, all I want to do is bake, bake, bake.

I’ll let you know how the baking extravaganza goes and include some reviews.

Also on the agenda is holiday crafting.  I’ve pulled out my yarn and I’m in the mood to knit and crochet some festive decorations.  Hopefully next time I’ll have some stuff to show and tell.  In the meantime, go bake some cookies!

*A quick search of marthastewart.com shows that a lot of these recipes are up on her site, if you want to check them out
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Candy Cane Cookies Photo: K Santos