Foodathon: It begins!

Last night, we started the actual cooking.  Luiz expressed his desire to really be involved with the baking this year, so he can feel like he's giving out gifts, too.  He loves all our friends and family, and really wants to contribute.  It was sweet, and boy was he handy!  Irv always helps, he's getting to be better in the kitchen than I am, but to have both guys working dilligently at my side really sped things up.

We started with making one test batch of lemon cookies.  I used a new soft sugar cookie recipe, and it was my idea to add lemon essence instead of vanilla, a splash of lemon juice, and roll the cookies in lemony sugar. When I made the first batch, I boggled at the quantity of butter (sure as shit, I predicted it.  4 lbs of butter is NOT going to be enough) but they came out so amazingly good, rich and lightly fragranced with lemon...they are definitely going to be my go-to sugar cookie recipe, and maybe competing with the molasses cookies as my top favorites. They're not so lemony that I even want to call them lemon cookies. They're a subtle buttery sugar cookie with a vague lemon aroma.

Awesome.  Batch 1 of the lemon cookies.  That's the homemade Kahlua in the back.

While those were going, we made all the rum balls. I made and chilled the dough, and the guys rolled, rolled, and rolled...and rolled...and rolled.  These are a no-bake easy as hell crowd pleaser, and I don't think I could have a Christmas without rum balls.

Check out that flurry of motion!

Somewhere in the middle of that, I whipped up the Kahlua, so it'll mellow before I give it out as gifts.  We get a bottle of it every year from the neighbors, and we love it so much, I did some research and figured out how to do it myself.  It's pretty well received by the drinkers among us.  We do homemade Baileys too, but I decided against it this year.  As far as booze goes, at some point, I want to get into infusing liqueurs, and maybe doing some lemoncello in the future.  It's fun.

At this point, I was hitting a wall, but still had some energy left...so we did all the chocolate chip M&M cookies.  Didn't get a pic of them in progress, because I was really stumbling through, but they went fast with the help, and came out excellent.

Those are all done!

I didn't anticipate getting those done, but since they're an annual favorite, making them is like clockwork.  Cue faceplant. I didn't even have the energy to upload the pics, or update this blog.

Tonight, we're doing the fudge, and the other two batches of cookies.  Then, we *should* be all done baking.  Tomorrow, once the fudge is set up, we'll assemble, or we'll start.  If we have extra time tonight, I want to make a batch of macaroons, maybe if they come out awesome enough, I'll throw some in to the buckets.