Santa Cookies

When you're growing up, certain things are lots of fun.  Christmas being one of them.  There are certain aspects, though, you really don't think you'll give a darn about until you're older.  Santa cookies being one of them.  I think, growing up, Santa got ChipsAhoy's in our house.  Being a new mommy, in a world where everyone can get great ideas online, ChipsAhoy's weren't going to cut it for my little man's first Christmas.  No Siree Bob!

I tried to decide what would make a good cookie for the Big Fellah.  There's lots of options really, and no one seems to agree on his favorite kind of cookies (you'd think he could just Tweet the answer and make us mom's lives easier), so I remembered a great gift idea I had saved up and how cute those looked.  Plus, they have oatmeal, so they're kinda healthy, right?  How can Santa not love Yummy and kinda healthy.

So, off the the Interwebz I went, and found my recipe.  It's a slightly modified version of these great Bakerella cookies in a jar.  Only difference is the M&M color, really.  Oh, and the fact that for some reason, I couldn't fit any nuts in my jars.  They seemed big enough!  So, I made 2 jars of them.  One I gave to a lovely friend of mine as part of a Secret Gift Exchange we were doing, and the other I ended up keeping for myself.

The mix, and my pretty new mixing bowl for the holidays.

The only thing they don't mention on either blog, and I wonder if I did it wrong, is the fact that the darn Brown Sugar got so hard, it took more effort than anticipated to get it out.  It hadn't dried out, but packing it in really tight made it nearly impossible to get out with breaking the whole jar.  After that was fixed (thank you hubby), we had absolutely no issues, and soon enough, we were ready to cook them up!

Love my Stoneware!!  Makes baking cookies SO easy and foolproof.

Little side note here.  I used my new Pampered Chef bar pan and it gave me GREAT results!!  All my cookie sheets are done for, to the point that I can barely use them even with my fake silpat, or even Parchment paper.  I'd never baked on it before, just made veggies, fries and random pieces of meats and appies, but it worked great with the cookies.  Might need to get a second one in the future :)

OK, so we cooked them all up, got a bit over 2 dozen of them, did a taste test, and yup, these are the cookies Santa will be getting at our house from here on out.  Probably won't bother doing the jar part next year, but it made for a pretty picture, at the very least.

Ready for Santa

One thing we still can't understand though, is where the next picture came from...  I did leave the camera in the living room, cause we were scrambling to get in bed (it was passed midnight, after all)...  Wonder if Wayne and Lanny were around to help Santa out.

Not sure who took this one, as we were all snug in our beds.  Curious...

Cheers, and a slightly late Merry Christmas to everyone!

(And yes, I'm aware this isn't really a 'craft', but the jar sort of is.  I did get the lids all pretty with Christmas paper and Modge Podge)