Cookie Baking Marathon

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If you ask me, December just calls for at least a day of baking cookies. My mom, my brother and I used to bake these basic cookies each year that only required 4 ingredients and were so easy to make but were so delicious. We would cut out different Christmas motives and cover some of them with my grandmother’s homemade jam. So easy and quick but so much fun. And the way they made the house smell! Mmm! For the past few years I’ve also been making gingerbread cookies and they were a big hit with my family and friends. Their smell is even more christmasy because of all the amazing spices. I attempted vanilla crescents a few times before too but that was about it. This year I decided to go big and make a few different cookies all in one day. I decided to make a cookie baking marathon or a cookie bake-off with myself if you will.

I searched through the internet, trying to find ideas for the best Christmas cookies and narrowed it down to the following (click on each type of cookies to go to the recipe on my blog):

* Basic Cookies with Melted Chocolate and Rainbow Sprinkles (I don’t know the author of this recipe, it’s been in our family for years)

* Gingerbread Cookies

* Vanilla Crescents (original recipe by Jaz kuham)

* Outrageous Chocolate Cookies (original recipe by Martha Stewart)

* Chocolate Chip Cookies (original recipe by Cooking Channel TV)

* Lemon Ricotta Cookies with Lemon Glaze (original recipe by Cooking Channel TV)

* White Chocolate Cranberry Cookies (original recipe by recipe by Taste of Home) and

* Raspberry Almond Thumbprint Cookies (original recipe by Sally’s baking addiction).

Oh and I also built a gingerbread house. As if making eight different kinds of cookies wasn’t time consuming enough 🙂

All cookies have been made healthier (as healthy as they can be with the smallest amount of modifications) by me, but otherwise I do not take credit for any of the recipes. I mostly replaced white flour with (whole wheat) spelt flour, white sugar with Xylitol or brown sugar, milk chocolate with dark chocolate and so on.

If you decide to bake all these cookies in one day, a little planning will be required. Here’s what I did. First of all I printed out all the recipes, calculated the amounts of spelt flour, xylitol, butter etc. I would need and wrote down a shopping list. Believe me, you do not have these amounts in your pantry! Next, make sure you have all day. I knew the baking would take me a while but I did not expect it to take so long. I started making the first cookie dough at 8 a.m. and did not sit down until 4 p.m. when I took the last batch out of the oven. This did not include me making the gingerbread house, I finished that in the evening. But lets go back to planning. Even though these cookies all take about 10 to 15 minutes to bake, there will be so many batches to put in the oven and take out that the 8 hours will fly by in no time. My advice is to make dough for the four types of cookies that require resting first.

These are Basic Cookies with Melted Chocolate and Rainbow Sprinkles, Gingerbread Cookies, Vanilla  Crescents and Raspberry Almond Thumbprint Cookies. Place them in the fridge and you will return to them once you’ve finished baking the other four. You can decide for yourself in what order you want to bake the remaining four types of cookies.

I do not suggest baking all these cookies at once if you don’t have any guests planned in the near future. Eating all of these by yourself can seriously hurt your health. But on the other hand, so does the eight hour baking. I think I might have gone a little crazy yesterday, but that is for you to judge after reviewing my below selfies 😛 All I can say is I really enjoyed myself yesterday. It definitely was a culinary adventure. Now all there is left to do is to eat all the cookies. Tough life I would say 😀

Another great thing that came out of my cookie baking marathon yesterday was my collaboration with the very talented Kristina Smodila from Designlicious. She made my cookie picture super pretty and cute, don’t you think? Check out her facebook page Darilo iz kozarca as well!

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