All this week I will be featuring the twelve cookies of Christmas.  Usually you hear about my Christmas baking because I have been baking with my mom and sister.  This year, with a pandemic and social distancing, everything is different.  Mom usually gives most of the cookies we bake away, but this year she isn’t seeing anyone or going anywhere.  So she wasn’t motivated to bake much.

So I have been doing most of the baking by myself.  I’m okay with that because I have a wonderful new kitchen to explore.  I even have a double oven and I’m still getting used to that.  I decided that I would bake the twelve cookies of Christmas – some new recipes and some old.  I’ve been doing two or three batches of cookies a week.  Once I bake them, I split them and give 1/3 to John and Jackie and 1/3 to Mom and Dad.  I leave some out and freeze some.  That way we don’t have too many cookies tempting us around the house at once.

The only problem with baking the cookies this way is that I never have a nice assortment to give to anyone else.  Oh well, just more for me to eat.

If I were really clever, I would work out the words to a song, but cookie names don’t really lend themselves to song.  Maybe you can help me out in that area.

Today I present the first four of my twelve cookies of Christmas.

1. 

   The first cookie of Christmas I baked were “Back for Seconds Brownies.”  I got the recipe from Stephanie Brubaker’s book, “Brownies, Blondies, and Bars” which I have mentioned before.  This brownie recipe is the base for all the brownie recipes in the book.  “Back for Seconds Brownies” have chocolate chips, cocoa powder, lots of butter and eggs, and two kinds of sugar.  I thought they were pretty good, but my taste-testers thought they were too sweet and chocolatey.  Too chocolatey?  Madness!  Jackie thought they would be best with ice cream or a cream cheese swirl.

2.  The second cookie of Christmas incorporated Jackie’s ideas from the first cookie.  I made Marbled Chocolate Cheesecake Bars.  The recipe is one I got from my mom, and it is a family favorite.  I’ve featured it before in my Christmas cookie baking.  The recipe I use is similar to this one from “Taste of Home.”  We all like these so much that they don’t last very long.

3.  Another favorite is “Reese’s Chewy Chocolate Cookies with Peanut Butter Chips.”  Tom and John always request these cookies when I’m baking.  They are easy and delicious and I always make a double batch so they last a little longer.  Tom mentioned that we are not out of them, and I promised I would make another batch as soon as I’m done with my twelve cookies of Christmas.

4.  The final featured cookie for today is one my mom made, “Buckeye Brownies.”  It is her new go-to recipe for something sweet.   She uses a Duncan Hines chewy fudge brownie box mix and adds in mini Buckeye candies that she gets from Grandpa’s Cheesebarn and Sweeties Chocolates.  Simple to make and delicious.  They are always such a hit that I barely got a picture of the last one.

Tomorrow I will post pictures of the next group of the twelve cookies of Christmas.  What kind of Christmas baking have you been doing?