Christmas 2019 - cookies for everyone

Christmas is once again upon us. For someone who didn't grow up with Christmas as a child, I have to say Christmas is just as magical as an adult. I am lucky to have family around town, made friends who consider me family, and work family who care. I want to share all the Christmas magic, and what better way to begin this blog with a bit of holiday magic dust, aka confectioners sugar.

 - Cookies for everyone -

Every year I always debate whether if I want to buy chocolates or make sweets for my work family. I mean no offense Lindt you are great, but making cookies is just that much more special. There's something about mixing the sugar with butter and sinking my fingers in the dough. Oh and it's totally therapeutic too.

This is the result of this year: chocolate crinkles, green tea short bread, and good ol' chocolate chip.

1) Chocolate crinkle

I have never made these before so it was a trial for sure. Basically I had cocoa powder in my pantry and not to know what to do with it. Googled around and settled a recipe on allrecipes.com. Well it looked like over 1k people had a good experience and.. I also have all the ingredients in my cupboard already. Score! Full recipe see link below, it's actually so good:

https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/9861/chocolate-crinkles-ii/

This required a bit of prep work, the actual recipe called for chilling the dough for 4 hours - I just waited over-night instead. I'm never organized enough to cook in the morning and wait 4 hours. When things require marinating or chilled or "rest", over-night is my go to. In terms of cookie size, since I'm making this for work I just free-handed these, but definitely smaller than what the recipe asked for. Baking time was more or less the same and it's actually so pretty. They look like little coal nuggets covered in snow! (Not that I have ever seen coal nuggets covered in snow but my imagination tells me that's probably the look.)

2) Green tea shortbread

Well, since we are on track of leaving cookie dough chilling overnight and using what's in my pantry - I also used my best friend Google as I'm trying to get this bag of matcha powder that's be sitting around. (Geez I have a lot of randoms in the cupboard, which really is a surprise since my kitchen is so so SO small.) I found this recipe which just looked so pretty on their website with the cotton cheesestring. And seriously it was the first matcha cookie recipe that popped up. I'm lazy, ya think?

https://www.justonecookbook.com/green-tea-white-chocolate-cookies/

Here are the modifications:
I didn't have white chocolate chips - because I don't like white chocolates so I decided to omit that. Any matcha power is good, mine was actually a "green tea powder" from a local Chinese grocery store. I should also mention that for any baking, I tend to cut down the sugar to 3/4 of a cup from 1 cup. My justification of eating these required a small caloric modification, short changing the sugar or butter or both makes me feel slightly healthier. And, no guest complains so far.

Green tea = antioxidants. Reduced sugar and butter = health conscience. I like what I just did here haha.

Dough also required chilling, in the fridge it goes, over-night it is.
The only regret is my dough log was a bit thicker in diameter than I wanted. I wanted to make the cookies small so it's bite size for work (like the chocolate crinkles). But it started to flake off - reduced butter didn't help much with binding I think? Well, small price to pay.

Baking these and chilling them was a bit of a challenge with 3 pans, and my incredible small kitchen. It got kind of messy lol but my house smelled so freaking good.

Here are the final results. Not the best lighting but I promise you they are so pretty. I'm not featuring the chocolate chip recipe because I got lazy and went to the store and got pre-made cookie dough. Didn't want my cookie boxes to look too empty and didn't feel like the extra mixing and such. It all worked out really well non the less.

Boxes are your regular shirt gift boxes from the local trusty dollar store, I gift wrapped the lid so it looked super festive. I produced 3 boxes of cookies to share - even with all the modifications (I'd like to think the modifications made these even better!). When I took it to work everyone welcomed these with open arms (open mouths?). There you have it, my December holiday cookie baking spree with pretty minimal effort, used mostly things directly from my cupboard, and with a slight health conscientious twist.