Today, I made another batch of Christmas cookies! While they are technically called "Glittering Lemon Sandwich Cookies, I really think that they should be renamed "Little Balls of Adorable." I found them on the Bon Appetit website and I think that they are just the cutest things on the planet (besides my kids, of course.) I didn't have the nice glittering sugar that they used but they still turned out pretty nice.

Just a nice lemony filling sandwiched by 2 tiny, delicate sugary cookies. They are really relaxing to make too. You have to roll the dough into balls and each contains only a scant teaspoon full- that is a whole lot of rolling! I set the bowl in front of the TV and caught up on the Young and the Restless :-)

They are just about the prettiest cookies I have ever made.

Unfortunately, they will not be making their way to our Christmas cookie tray this year. While they look good, I definitely screwed up on something. "Delicate" is an understatement for these little bits of goodness. Mine practically crumble into fine sugary sand if you look at them too hard. Forget giving them to the kids... they wouldn't even make it into their mouths before crumbling onto the floor. I'm surprised that I was even able to sandwich them without them falling apart. Oh well. Isabel says they look like hamburgers anyway- and who wants to serve hamburgers on a cookie tray. I guess I need to do some research to find out what went wrong. Maybe I will try again next year!

UPDATE: My husband sampled one of my delicious cookies and he laughed- hysterically. So hysterically that I thought that he was going to choke. I warned him that they would crumble if he didn't eat the whole thing at once and I don't think that he believed me. hee hee. I wasn't kidding. He likened them to a scene in a movie (I think it was the Mummy) where stuff just dissolves into sand. That is my cookies.

Betty Crocker is my friend. For round 3 of my Betty Crocker Christmas cookie marathon, Isabel and I made Fiesta Fudge Cookies. They were super simple (as were all of the cookies I have made thus far) and I don't think that they could have tasted any better.

We used dark chocolate and candy cane Hershey's kisses. The candy cane kisses were perfect for the holiday but I am a sucker for the dark chocolate. It ended up being a nice mix of color.

Isabel was my official Hershey's kisses unwrapper (and candy sneaker.) Everytime she ate a candy, she would try to hide it... but she didn't realize that the chocolately evidence was smeared all over her face. hee hee.

Yum! Since the recipe makes so many, no one will notice that we just might have sampled a couple... just to make sure they were going to be OK for the holidays :-)

There is something so special about a train running under the Christmas tree.

Thanks to my amazing Mom, we now have one chug-a-lugging under the tree right now.

Needless to say, Isabel is rather fond of it.

She loves controlling it too. Michael told her that she was doing it wrong, though, because trains don't all of a sudden take off like a race car- they start and stop very slowly. He is such a nerd :-) hee hee.

Juliet and Ellie loved the train too. Every time it made its way around the loop, Juliet would let out a piercing squeal of excitement. It was adorable.

The first official craft of the Christmas season!

I couldn't resist the call of the cotton ball Santa. I just had to make them with the goobers.

Totally adorable.

We also cracked out the baking sheets for our first official cooking baking session of the season. Ellie and Juliet were sleeping so it was just me and Iz!

Fun with powdered sugar!

Our chocolate crinkle snowball cookies were anything but crinkly- but WOW did they taste good. We kept it simple and just used the Fudge Crinkle recipe we found on the Betty Crocker website. They look nothing like the picture. Oh well. The plan was to freeze the majority of them for our Christmas cookie tray but we might have eaten all but 5. Whoops! It is going to be a pretty small cookie tray this year!

Thanks to my amazingly wonderful husband, I am back in the picture taking business- just in time for a little holiday hall decking! Happy Days!

We began our festivities with the children itching to strangle themselves with the cords of our holiday lights.

Everyone's favorite part was simply taking everything out of the boxes. They looked at each ornament, decoration and wreath like it was the most amazing thing they had ever seen. And then they lovingly threw each piece on the floor, trampling it as they fought over who would be allowed to take out the next piece of holiday goodness.

Ellie and Juliet did a surprisingly good job hanging the ornaments on the tree.

Isabel helped fix all of her sister's ornaments that didn't quite make it on the tree.

The tree ended up looking pretty good. We shall see how long it takes before Ellie and Juliet break and/or eat all of the ornaments.