The holidays are here and that means it’s time for family, friends and most importantly delicious food and desserts. I host my extended family on Christmas Eve with the traditional Italian seven fish dinner. Also as the baker of the family, I (happily) am in charge of the desserts for Christmas Eve and Christmas.
The dinner on Christmas Eve takes almost all day to cook, so the last thing I want to be doing is baking at 9 p.m. for the following day. So whatever dessert we have on Christmas Eve has to be something that will still be good the following day. You name it, my family has eaten it – pies, cupcakes, cakes. Last year I was seeing a lot of cookie recipes and I thought that would be a great dessert for the holidays – I mean who doesn’t like cookies?
Right away I knew I was in trouble. There were too many good cookie recipes to choose from. I don’t have an overly large family and there was no way I could make all the recipes without a ton of leftovers that would just go bad. How was I possibly going to choose which ones to make without serious FOMO with the ones I had to leave behind? That’s where my sweet sister came in.
If you don’t have a sweet sister, you need to get one. It’s a person who loves baking and eating sweets just as much as you. Someone who can say yes to, “Hey let’s have some cinnamon rolls and peach Bellinis.” My sweet sister was also in charge of dessert for both holidays and was having trouble deciding what to make. So we decided to combine forces and went all out with a cookie baking party.
What Is A Cookie Baking Party
A cookie baking party is a lot like a Pinterest Potluck. Except that you don’t show up to the host’s house with the cookies already baked. You bake them together. The hardest part is choosing the cookies to bake.
Make Your Cookie Selections
My sweet sister and I decided we would each choose five cookie recipes to make. There were some staples that just had to be included (Tollhouse chocolate chip) and then others we found online that looked too good to pass up. The week before the baking party we went over what ingredients we would need to get and which ones we already had. I was responsible for the ingredients of my five recipes and she was responsible for her five. We also decided to bake all the cookies at my house since I had a double oven.
Let the Cookie Baking Party Begin!
The Friday before Christmas Eve my sweet sister pulled up with a trunk full of groceries and supplies and we got down to baking. We were making double batches of each cookie, but we knew better than to just double the ingredients. Seriously – if you’ve ever tried that you KNOW that never works. I used my standing mixer for one batch and she used the hand mixer for the other. Before we knew it we were cranking out cookies like a professional bakery. My husband was actually pretty shocked at the rate in which we were moving. By the end of the day, we had baked over 300 cookies. It took about four hours to do all the baking. That was also around the time my daughter came into the house from school. Needless to say she thought Christmas came early.
A New Yearly Event
Not only was our cookie baking party fun, but it was a huge hit! My family loved every single cookie we made. We had more than enough for Christmas Eve and Christmas, with a few left over that didn’t last past New Years. This year there will be another cookie baking party. My family is requesting that certain recipes be repeated. For me, I’m already making tabs on recipes I want to try. The hardest part will be narrowing down the list to just five because I never met a cookie I didn’t like.
