Visions of Sugarplums

A snow day on Friday gave us a headstart on a weekend of baking, baking, and more baking!

Our new recipe this year was Raspberry Stars.

They involve butter cookie dough, raspberry jam, and anise icing.

I ended up making three more batches of these to feed the voracious appetite of my friends and family! Needless to say, they're a keeper!

We also found a new recipe for paint-on sugar cookie icing.

Nicky liked to paint his cookies wild colors.

Kairi was more traditional.

I loved the way this Santa of mine turned out. All together, though, I think they were the best looking sugar cookies we ever made!

They dried nice and hard, too, so we were able to stack them in tins for the kids teachers with all of the other cookies we made. What else did we make? Well...

Here's what's left AFTER we filled nine cookie tins, plus two big trays for my work and Scott's! Cyndy, Faith, and Juli came over for a little while Saturday morning and helped with the reindeer and peanut blossoms. Kai worked on the Hello Dollies. And I made the double decker peanut butter fudge, although I ended up making two more batches of that as well! Nick and Scott made some delicious LOOKING peppermint brownies, but they must have missed a step because they wouldn't bake and just stayed runny, which was really too bad, since there weren't any more peppermint chips at the store. We never did get to the Candy Cane cookies, or the traditional fudge. But no one was complaining!