Baking holiday cookies

 As per usual, this is the time of year where we bake a lot of cookies.  I normally hand out Holiday Shortbread cookies. The boys SUPER love these cookies, even if I missed out an entire cup of butter in it! Ya... I was using blocks of butter that was given to us by our neighbor.  They were clearing our their fridge/freezer as they are moving out.  Well, I thought the one block was enough and when the cookies came out, the entire sheet of it was cracked??!

The cookie sheet had pulled away from the pan too. By now I knew something was not right!

I couldn't even cut into it with my cookie cutters!!!

So at this point, I rechecked the recipe.  I mean there are only 4 ingredients.  How could I possibly mess up??!  Flour - check, butter - check, sugar - check, and salt - check!!!

Well, it didn't matter too much how much butter was missed in this batch as the boys still enjoyed eating these imperfect cookies.  Ha ha!  

Next batch was a lot better thankfully:

There,... these look a lot better:

We get to eat the leftovers and thankfully nobody minds :-)

This year we decided to bake some sugar cookies from store-bought cookie mix/bags.  Gosh, this is probably why I don't enjoy baking cookies.  You have to be so precise!  As you can see, the colors of the cookies are not all consistent:

2nd batch was a little bit better although I did also burn a few of the Christmas stockings.  As usual, boys are more than happy to "take care" of those :-D

You really have to make sure the cookies have enough space to expand on the cookie sheet.  This angel has its head lifted up a bit and looking like its saying "Hello" or maybe more like "Don't eat me!". LOL!!!  Okay, yeah... perhaps I have been baking for just a bit too long now:

I did get the boys to help out this year with the sugar cookies.  I think I may do this again next year.  The big huge box from Costco was really affordable and it comes with 5 bags of mix cookie dough. And each bag makes about 35 cookies. What a bargain!

On a side note, I finally juiced up some oranges and carrots.  We love fresh juice and really miss having that every day.  We were definitely spoiled for choices when we lived in Abu Dhabi.  It was available every single day in the supermarket.  Anyhow, our juicer spits out a lot of the pulp so I ended up making an orange-carrot cake with most of this pulp. I'm so glad the boys love this cake (even when I had reduced the amount of sugar).  It definitely gets all that fiber into their digestive system!

We'll be baking more cookies today on Christmas eve.  It will be our 4th bag of cookie mix! I've also bought some icing so it should be a fun icing-day some as well.  We have to get some cookies ready for Santa when he comes tonight!  I think Charlie still believes in Santa although he has his doubts about "How does Santa come into the house when we don't have a chimney?" or "How does Santa come in when all our doors are locked and the security alarm is on???"  I think Graham knows for sure now that Santa is really just us, but I'm so glad he plays along for Charlie's sake.  What a sweet brother he is!

Merry Christmas Eve everyone!!!