C is for Christmas and COOKIES!

After a lot of Christmas shopping on Monday, we decided to make sugar cookies.

We decorated all of them because we intended to give some away, but we ended up eating all of them over the next few days (which is funny because none of us alike to extra candy so we ended up picking all of it off again). Can you guess who made these two cookies? They were my favorites, although I wouldn't say they were Christmasy.

Tuesday we stuck around the house and spent a little time enjoying the warm weather.

Then that evening we made a gingerbread house, but since none of us are big gingerbread fans, and we had a lot of cookie dough the evening before, we made a sugar cookie house. I totally free-handed the shapes of the walls and roof so I wasn't too confident that it would all fit together, but it did!

And here's the final product.

I had a few requests for my sugar cookie recipes so I'm posting it here. It's from my friend Amy Hall and it is the BEST sugar cookie recipe because you don't have to chill it and it's still delicious! It makes a TON of cookies so you could probably cut the recipe in half, but we made the whole recipe because we used part of it to make our gingerbread house.

No-Chill Sugar Cookies

1 pound butter

2 cups sugar

3 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla

6 - 7 cups of flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

3/4 teaspoon salt

Beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs and vanilla and mix well. Add dry ingredients. Roll out 1/4 inch thick and cut. Bake at 375 degrees until edges just start to get golden brown. Makes 8 or 9 dozen cookies and frost with buttercream frosting.

Note: The recipes calls for baking SODA, not baking POWDER as I assumed the first time I made this recipe (are you really surprised? You know I'm a disaster in the kitchen). I'd already thrown in the baking powder before I realized my mistake and then without thinking I threw in the baking soda too so I was prepared for disaster when I pulled the cookies out of the oven, but they we fine.