12 Days of Christmas Cookies

I've pooped out at day 7. LOL Oh well.

If I had been able to keep going, what great Xmas presents! Which is, actually, the reason I make them all.

Date bars - my personal favorite. They are dates, pecans, a little flour, egg and sugar and that's it. Wonderful cookies! If you like, you can roll them in powdered sugar, but it isn't required.

London Short Bread - sort of a sugar cookie, but not that much sugar. Butter, egg, flour, corn starch and sugar.

Nut balls - folks laugh. I don't care what they're called. They're delicious as well. Pecans, butter, flour. Roll in powdered sugar.

Kiss cookies - I love them. They're a little crisp - I was tired making them. Chocolate chip cookie dough without the chocolate chips. I put regular kisses and the cherry cordial kisses on this time. I do hate the individual wrapping, which is why I don't make them every year.

Muffins - this year saw apple, cran-orange and blueberry.

Peanut Butter cookies - still have to make these.

Welsh Cakes - ahhh - another most haven't heard of. Very simple - griddle cookies. You use dried fruit - currants are the traditional, flour, sugar, egg. Roll them out, cut them with a biscuit cutter and flop onto your griddle. Simple. Not too sweet. Just right. I made blueberry, cranberry, and currant.

And while there is significant effort involved, the amount of money is minimal for the amount of joy they bring. I give them to friends and family alike, for so many don't take the time anymore.

Did you know that even doing all of this labor yourself, and using your oven daily, you are still saving an incredible amount of energy, rather than buying premade cookies? Think of the shipment of ingredients, the industrial energy consumed in preparing them, the packaging - the making of the packaging, the shipping to the store, you buying, reboxing and giving out.

Making them yourself is far better for the earth, and your soul! It's wonderful therapy to create so much joy with such simple measures.

Potato Flour

I have wheat sensitive asthma, so have been trying different flours for my morning pancakes. I've gone through rye, quinjoa, millet, brown rice (favorite so far), corn, and a couple others I can't think of their names - heirloom grains - to see what is most tasty and agreeable with my asthma. It's not as if I go into status asthmaticus, I just like to not get out of breath going up stairs.

So - the latest flour to try - potato.

LOL - it is not a 1:1 exchange. It's not a 1:10 exchange. I don't know what ratio you would use, but trust me, it isn't much. When the label says, "put a tablespoon into baked good for a moist crumb", they mean a tablespoon.

I decided to make my batch of pancakes for the week, half potato, half brown-rice. It took a QUART of milk and 2 eggs to get it so I could spoon it. As soon as I added the normal 3/4 C of milk, it turned to concrete. Uh oh. Add more milk, still concrete. Add more milk and use a whisk. Still lumpy and thick. Add more milk and use the electric beaters. Add more milk, keep beating. Add more milk. LOL

Then, there was no turning them. I had greased the skillet heavily with corn oil and they stuck like glue. My regular pancake flipper just wasn't up to the task. Change flippers. Turn the flipper upside down to get better leverage. Turn half a pancake, and scrape the other half to get it flipped. Wash flipper off. Repeat with the remaining three.

They're moist. They've got a great taste. They're nothing to look at. And I've got a lot more scraping to do on my skillet to get the remnants off.

I'm going to try making a batch of rolls out of the rest of the mix. LOL - I hate wasting that kind of volume, so it'll become an expirement.

I'll let you know. LOL

At least it's sunny out today and we got snow instead of ice, so it's not a bad day by any stretch. It just got off to an interesting start.