It's begining to look a lot like Christmas cookies...

For years, my mom has baked a bunch of Christmas cookies, including M&M cookies with red and green M&M's. Since she has some health issues, and my dad has even more, it seemed unlikely that she would be baking cookies. So I decided to take a stab at it, and got the recipe from her. My work decided to drop our normal lavishly catered Christmas party in favor of a potluck (boo) so I figured I'd bake them for that as well.

So this morning I started baking. I've never done any baking before, and it took a little while to get the hang of it - the first batch came out crispy on the edges and soft in the middle, the second batch came out burned. But the rest came OK, and I have about 30 decent cookies to take into work, which I figure should be enough - and about 12 damaged cookies left for me.

The other challenge was that I'm not exactly equipped for baking. I burned out the motor on my cheap $10 hand mixer, and only had two decent cookie sheets, so it took a long time to make two batches.

Next weekend I'll be at this again, to make cookies to take to NJ with me. I'll do a triple batch - I just need to buy more butter, I've got enough of everthing else. And I've already ordered 2 more cookie sheets and a better hand mixer from Amazon with my free Prime trial.