Christmas Cookies

As you can tell, I made a lot of cookies this year for Christmas. Joy and I estimate that we baked over 300. And by we baked, I mean, I baked. Although, don't get me wrong, she totally helped. She just didn't actually put anything in the oven. =P

We make all these cookies (and cake balls) solely to give away to people as Christmas gifts. I think it's a brilliant idea because 1) I love baking and 2) I love giving gifts. I love how excited and happy people are when they receive a tin of homemade goodies. Delivering them is seriously the best part (and eating the extras is pretty awesome too).

We ran out of room to put them all, too. Our apartment has been a little crowded (messy) lately, because we've all been stressed and busy with exams...some things (like doing laundry), get pushed to the side. Oh, the life of college students.

Nifty trick: the sugar cookies are just dipped in canned icing. I melted it in the microwave so it would get runny and added regular ol' food coloring (all my awesome gel pastes are at home) to make it redish and greenish. After you let them sit for a couple of hours (or over night), they get hard enough to package, but the icing is still soft when you bit into it. So simple, so brilliant. :)

The cake balls are strawberry/chocolate and carrot cake/white chocolate. I LOVE the strawberry. Once again, I went with the convenience of box mixes and canned icing. But with all the hard work that went into them, I'm sure nobody minded.

All in all, it was about a 3 day process. Joy and I did this last year too, and I love that we make a yearly tradition out of it (although she's been doing this for years before she even met me). One of our friends said our apartment looked like a bakery and our roommates and everyone who came by loved that we had extra cookies sitting around to snack on. Merry Christmas everyone!

(Just a quick reminder to let you know that you can vote every 24 hours for the "Show Your Duff" contest, so if you voted yesterday, don't forget to do it again today! I noticed that my entry is on the 2nd page-- there are 10 pages right now-- of cakes with the most votes, so let's see if we can move on up to page #1! And to everyone who's already voted: Thank you! You have no idea how much this means to me! I wish I could give a Christmas tin full of cookies to every one of you, for voting, for telling your friends to vote, for liking me on Facebook, for reading my blog, for encouraging me to go after my dreams. I love you all! <3)