Cookies

This is not a cookie. It is, however, a very important part of this blog post. Mostly because I'm drinking it right now, and it's freaking delicious. WHAT, I'M ON VACATION.

Every year for Christmas, I make cookies.

Not the sugar-sprinkled kind, or anything that involves the rolling out of dough or the purchasing of molasses.   

(One year, I made gingerbread cookies and dropped a jar of molasses on the kitchen floor. Do you know how hard it is to clean up molasses from a kitchen floor? You start by picking up the shards of glass from the bottle, and then you drink half a bottle of wine and curl up on the couch and cry and Google "clean molasses up from kitchen floor" and vow never to make gingerbread cookies or anything involving molasses again.)

Oh wait - you really wanted to know how to clean molasses up off of the kitchen floor? I'm pretty sure I used newspapers to scoop most of it up, and then sprayed every household cleaner I could find on the stickiness (and there's a good chance I used some wasp killer by accident too - I was just grabbing at chemicals at that point) and then we all wore flip flops in the kitchen until we moved out a few months later and left the sticky floor for someone else to deal with. 

On another side note, guess what else you can make with molasses? NOTHING. Except for, apparently, some weird-flavored homemade yogurt and "mango banana ketchup," or so Google tells me. No, thank you. So, basically, you buy a jar of molasses, use about 1/4 of a cup of it for gingerbread cookies and then forever after have 3/4 of a jar of molasses (covered in sticky crap) sitting in your cupboard. 

Unless you drop it on the floor. So, really, maybe I did myself a favor. I didn't have to stare at a 3/4 full jar of molasses every time I was scooting through the kitchen cupboard trying to figure out what to make for dinner. 

That was a really long aside.

This is what sixteen dozen cookies looks like. Before baking.

I'll try this again.

Every year for Christmas, I make cookies. Chocolate chip cookies, to be exact, and I ONLY use the Tollhouse recipe. It's the only way to make chocolate chip cookies, I think. I don't muck about with the recipe and add anything like oatmeal or nuts or M&M's, it's just plain old Tollhouse chocolate chip cookies. And this year, I made sixteen dozen of them.

Batch #1 of 2

This bad boy was my Mom's, and it's now mine. It's perfect for cookies, mashed potatoes, frostings, and can pinch hit for a blender if necessary.
It only occasionally smells like smoke, and the plug is probably still street-legal.

I gave a dozen to coworkers, several dozen to friends and roommates, ate about a dozen

myself, and sent the rest overseas to The Gentleman for Christmas.

In case you ever need to know, it costs $48.99 to mail cookies to the Middle East in a package that weighs about 6 pounds. It will take approximately one week to ten days, and I really have no idea of the actual time scope because they sat in a P.O. box for an undisclosed amount of time before my friends could pick them up and deliver them to The Gentleman.

Mailing cookies to the Middle East requires a lot of tins and wax paper and very careful packing. The Gentleman tells me that they arrived mostly intact, which sounds like a win.

In other words, I'm off from work for two weeks for the holidays and now that my cookie baking extravaganza is complete, all gifts are wrapped and ready to go, I'm done with my holiday chores and basically just preparing to eat, drink, and be merry this week. 

Oh, and fly to Prague on Thursday to meet The Gentleman for vacation. I should probably start packing for that.

After I finish my vanilla porter. And eat a cookie.