2nd Annual Cookie Night

Tonight Thomas and I had Diane, John and Chris over for dinner and Cookie Night. Cookie Night started with Chris wanting to make cookies last Christmas - just for the fun of it. Well it turned out to be a lot of fun. Very messy, but a lot of fun. A sugar high, but a lot of fun. Some strange cookies, but a lot of fun. So Chris and Diane talked and decided they wanted to do it again this year. So tonight was the night. Thomas cooked us a great dinner. He made chicken breast stuffed with broccoli and cheese, spinach and strawberry salad, roasted green beans and bread. For dessert (I know we were making cookies but we decided we wanted something else for dessert) he made a cheesecake with raspberry topping. It was a fantastic dinner.

Once everyone was done eating we began work on the cookies. Diane brought the cookie dough mixed and ready for rolling out and cutting. Chris brought all the ingredients for the icing as well as a large assortment of cookie cutters and things to decorate the cookies with (such as colored sprinkles, little snowflake candies, red hots, colored sugar, etc.). They also brought extra cookie sheets and other things to help with the cookie making process. As Chris put it - "I brought my whole kitchen". So while Chris mixed up the icing, John and Diane started rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies. After cutting as many cookies as we could from the rolled out dough we put them on cookie sheets and then picked up the extra dough, re-formed it into a ball and put it back into the refrigerator to chill. We took some other dough that had already been chilled and rolled it out and cut more cookies. This continued with John, Diane and I rotating through the process. At the same time Chris, Diane and John took turns watching the cookies in the oven. We continued with this until all the cookie dough had been rolled out and cut or it was eaten ( I won't mention names but you know who you are) and all the cookies had been cooked. At this point most of the kitchen was covered in cookie dough or flour and the table was covered in boring cookies and cups of different colored icing and other things to decorate the cookies with.

Now it was time to decorate the cookies. Diane, John, Chris and I sat at the table and started decorating. We passed icing back and forth, tried to do our artistic best to create stunning Christmas Cookies and in the end actually made some neat cookies and a big mess. There were snowflakes, angels, christmas trees, reindeer, stars, and other shapes we couldn't identify. It was loads of fun. And in case you haven't noticed but I haven't mentioned Thomas' name in the cookie making process. He managed to not get involved with any of the cookie stuff but he did clean up our big mess - thankfully. By the time we finished there was icing all over the table and sprinkles everywhere but who cares when you are having fun.

When we were planning the night Diane wanted to know how many cookies we made last year and how much dough to bring. I couldn't remember how many we made (I estimated about 4 dozen) or how many the recipe yielded so Diane decided to just double the recipe and we thought that would be fine. After we talked I went back and looked at pictures from last year (go to 1st Annual Cookie Night to see pictures from last year) and it looked like we made quite a few more that 4 dozen. I didn't get an exact count tonight but I am estimating that we made between 80 and 100 cookies. Thankfully we can give most of them away - can you imagine us having to eat all of them - not a pretty picture. But here some pretty pictures of tonight's fun.