Christmas Cookies

Today is my last official day of vacation.  I hope to be back next week with stories and pictures of the trip! Since Christmas is creeping up on us, here's a look back at my first Christmas in my own home.

In years past for our girls night in party, we’ve had an ugly Christmas sweater party where we have to come wearing the most hideous article of clothing that ever attempted to express Christmas cheer. To follow that we had an ugly Christmas ornament party – same concept different media.

This year instead of making fun of something, we were going to spread good tidings of great blessings in the form of Christmas cookies. Only I took it a step further and made them ugly Christmas cookies. Not on purpose, mind you. But ugly none the less.

As I was writing about making cookies for the party, a message board friend of mine mentioned that she loved thumbprint cookies. A link was provided and after a little research on my party a horrible idea was born.

I decided that I could take the tea cake recipe I had made on Monday (and chilled overnight) and make them into thumbprint cookies. After all the only part that made the thumbprint cookies different was the circle in the middle and the jam right?



Put 4 spoon fulls of cookies across the cookie sheet and four down, the filled them with jam. I had some homemade peach jam my mother had made over the summer as well as some black raspberry jam my MIL purchased on her last visit.

I put them in the oven to bake and went on with my business, not realizing the tea cake recipe I had made the cookies from had a tendency to spread out rather than up. . I had 2 more dozen cookies to make, and I was going to roll them out into Christmas shapes and make plain sugar cookies out of them.



As I was struggling to roll out the dough and attempting to make snowmen cookies, my kitchen smelled wonderful. I could smell the jam as I warmed in the oven. After giving up on making shapes with the other cookies, I checked in on the “thumbprint” cookies.

As the cookies had spread on the baking sheet, they ran out of room and some of the dough/jam combination were pushed overboard. It landed dangerously close to the heating element in my oven, so I called my mother for assistance.

“I have cornbread run over all the time, its fine. Just let it get all crusty and it’ll be easier to clean up later."

“So it won’t catch on fire or anything?”

“Nope, it’ll be fine.”

As she had said, the dough cooked, then burnt, then got really crispy.

And then it burst into flames.

I got under the kitchen sink to get the fire extinguisher, but my brilliant husband insisted that would make too big of a mess and through water into my electric oven. I can honestly say it was only by the grace of God that he didn’t kill himself, my oven, or both in the process.

As he raised the windows to get rid of the smoke smell, I began cleaning out the oven.



Actually my oven is still dirty, but I cleaned out the big chunks so there was no risk of anything else catching on fire. After all I had 2 more dozen cookies to bake.



After the makeshift thumbprints cooled, I helped myself to a bite. They actually tasted very good. Too bad they looked “ugly” for our Christmas cookie exchange.