...mmmm, cookies!!

I only have like two seconds to write this. It's 1:30 am, and I'm supposed to be getting up in 4 hours to hit the road up to Santa Barbara. My sweet friend Katie Grace is graduating from Brooks tomorrow! YAY!! Congrats girl! The ceremony is at 10, then lunch afterward, then I'm back on the road to home (hopefully avoiding traffic!). Then decorating Sugar cookies with Meg and her mom in the evening, and hopefully making it to the triple date we had planned at the beach with Brian and Britt, and Alex and (I don't know her name! oops!) Needless to say, it's going to be a very long day.

Anyway, back to those cookies. Snowmen, big trees, little trees, big bells, little bells, Santa's, angels, and stars. If you know anything about it me, you probably know I LOVE to cook, and bake. Well, I learned that from my mom. You maybe have never had her food...if not, you are seriously missing out. Back in the day, my friends used to come over just to eat whatever my mom was making. It's amazing. Her cookies (esp the Christmas variety) far exceed any preconceived expectations you may have about cookies. They are incredible. I've had friends ask for her recipes as a birthday present! It's kind of a tradition that she and my Grammy and I bake Christmas cookies every year. The favorites, by far, are the sugar cookies. With just a hint of lemon, and the time and temp down to a science, we create these amazingly addictive, oh so yummy treats. I like them best unfrosted, but there's not a whole lot of fun in that...so after baking them, we usually sit down with our best friends and frost until our wrists hurt, and our fingers are dyed. Everytime we make sugar cookies, it's automatically a double batch. This time...we made six of them. Six double batches! Thats 30 cups of flour, 12 cups of sugar, 18 cubes of butter, 24 eggs, and a whole lot of salt, baking powder, and lemon. Wow! It turned out to be 31 dozen cookies. And thats only with 4 batches baked! Around 12 am we started getting a little delirious...I spit my tea all over the place, in the midst of side-splitting laughter, and quite honestly, could not care if I baked another sugar cookie in my entire life! (although that will change tomorrow, of course!) Finally, both of us covered in flour and full of cookie dough, we finished around 12:45, and after 4 hours of cookies, we were glad to be done for the night. Here's a brief glimpse of the beginnings of our work...Snowmen, big trees, little trees, big bells, little bells, Santa's, angels, and stars...
I grabbed it with my iPhone before the stacks got too out of control. When we finish the rest of the dough I'll try to catch a more detail depiction of the adventures in the kitchen!! In the mean time, if you need some cookies...you know where to look! ;)