Holiday Mania!

I'm just finishing the last of a four-day weekend and I've been the busiest little bee getting ready for the holidays! I've got lots of little projects in the works and I took this opportunity to finish up as many as I could. Actually, I did quite well and I'm so pleased with the progress! Many things were finished in their entirety and others progressed nicely, but still have a few things to do before being completed.

Yesterday I made three big batches of cookie dough and stashed it in the freezer for the annual Holiday Cookie Bake-Off with Deb which will be here before we know it. WHEW! When I say big batches of cookie dough, I'm not kidding! I began mixing at 12:15 yesterday afternoon and finally finished at 4:00...when I promptly plopped myself down on the couch and refused to move for the next hour. No matter - I'm glad it's done, and I'm grateful that I had the time to finish up this project before things became too hectic and crazy - as it always does around the holidays!

Here are the chocolate chip cookies (yes dad, they've got LOTS of walnuts in them!).
I find it a huge time saver to freeze the cookie dough once it's been scooped into individual cookies. That way you can just take the bag out of the freezer and place each scoop of cookie dough on the baking sheet and bake them off; no worries about waiting for it to thaw before you can scoop the dough into cookies. I also made a big batch of chocolate crinkles and a big batch of molasses crinkles. YUM! Just the smell of all of that cookie dough gave me a wonderful sugar rush!