Big White Chocolate, Almond, and Cranberry Cookies

This recipe means it: these cookies are big!  1/4 cup of dough for each cookie.  Even though they contain enough butter and sugar to stop your heart, they are amazingly good.  So, break out your colored Kitchenaid mixer that you got for your wedding and use once a year because these cookies are worth it! This recipe was a bit out of my comfort zone because it contained more than five ingredients.  It also reminded me that baking soda is actually used in cooking instead of only for being left in the back of my fridge for several months as a deodorizer.  ("Replace after three months"? I think David Tennant was still The Doctor when I put mine in there).

Tablespoon added for scale.  

Coconut and Orange Snowballs

I made cookies!  And my house is still standing!  I don't bake terribly often.  I feel like baking has to be so precise.  I can't just cover up my mistakes with garlic.  I think the last time I made cookies was for my friend Maggie's cookie swap last year.  Fitting that I made them this year for the same party.  This year I decided to branch out and try a recipe with more ingredients.  They turned out so well that I made them twice!  And the second time I was willing to feed them to my parents, so you know they were good.

Proper Christmas dish provided by my mom.  I just use ziplock because I'm lazy like that.  

Pistachio, Cranberry, and White Chocolate Cookies

I baked! :D I went to a friend's cookie swap before Christmas and baked cookies for probably the fifth time in my life.  This recipe is perfect for a novice baker because there aren't a lot of ingredients and there is a little room to change it if you want.  For example, I used cranberries instead of cherries and added a little extra white chocolate.  I prefer the tartness of the cranberries over sweet cherries. I used white chocolate chips because it was faster than chopping a baking bar. The dough can stay in the freezer for a week or so if you want to make another batch later.  These cookies are small and crunchy, it's hard to eat just one.  I think they're perfect for Christmas because of the red and green from the cranberries and pistachios.

Here are all the ingredients you need!

Harry Potter and the Fabulous Chocolate Frogs

The final Harry Potter movie comes out next week, and it's bittersweet for me.  Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was published when I was in college, and I haughtily dismissed it as dreck that was aimed at tweens.  And did so until the first movie came out during law school.  One of my classmates wanted to go see it to make sure it was suitable for her kids to watch, and several of us tagged along.  I was highly skeptical.  Coming out of the movie theater, I remember telling my friends how I wanted to read the books right away.  The next day, I went to the bookstore and bought the first four books, Order of the Phoenix hadn't come out yet.  I was converted; I turned into somewhat of a Harry Potter fangirl.  Now, all of the books have been published, and the last movie is coming out in a few days.  As cliched as it sounds, it's the end of an era. 

Thankfully, I have friends with similar interests, and over last weekend, I had them over to watch Deathly Hallows Part 1 before we see Part 2 (at midnight!) when it comes out.  One of the foods that has always amused me in the Harry Potter books are chocolate frogs.  Margaret brought over some frog shaped candy molds and I quickly became obsessed.  Making frog shaped chocolate is remarkably easy.   I nuked a measuring cup full of broken Hershey's milk chocolate bars, poured it into the molds, and froze it for 15-20 minutes.  Then, I repeated with Hershey's dark chocolate.  The result were some adorable chocolate frogs!  Even though I froze them, they got a little melty on the plate.  So, I served them in a Pyrex dish filled with ice and topped with tinfoil to keep them cool.  I guess that once I heated the chocolate, it made it more prone to melting.  I made extra frogs and kept them in the freezer until all of these were eaten.  These were a fun way to eat chocolate.

These might not hop around, but they're still cute!

Star Wars Cookies! A Guest Post by Maggie Cats

As previously noted, I can't bake my way out of a paper bag unless you like your baking products heavily smoked with a side of whatever it is that comes out of a fire extinguisher.  My friend Maggie, however, is a fantastic baker that shares my love of sci fi.  I tasted her awesome Star Wars cookies a few weeks ago, and she offered to write a guest post about them.  You can visit Maggie at her personal blog, Grasping for Reality, or at her TV blog, We're Wicket Smaht.  But seriously, make the cookies. 
 Enjoy!!  - Scienter___________________________________________________________________

Some things in this world were just made for each other. Peanut butter and jelly, Indiana Jones and his hat, Lizzy and Mr. Darcy. And now we can add Scienter and blogging to the list. I don’t know about you, but the things that she makes for this cooking blog constantly astound me. And she just whips them up at home in the evenings after working hard all day (trust me, I know since I work with her). 

But there is one thing missing from this blog: baked goods. 

Where are the cupcakes, the cookies, the pies, the muffins?

According to Scienter, she “doesn’t bake.” Now riddle me this, gentle readers. How can a woman who can knock out some uber-complicated Middle Eastern-Japanese-Creole fusion meal not be able to cream butter and sugar, throw in some flour, and slap on some icing? It’s a mystery and I blame her mother. 

But luckily for you, I invited myself to guest-post on her blog about my most recent baking adventure. I would call myself an amateur cook at best (it’s only really been in the past year since I remodeled my kitchen that I have started really cooking), but I am a champion baker. My mother has been prepping me for this my whole life—she wanted to make sure I was properly trained in the baking arts. You start small with boxed brownie mix as a preteen, and by age 30 graduate to fully taking over the holiday baking duties. 

My most recent baking project combined two of my favorite things: cookies and fandom, specifically, Star Wars. Thanks to my Aunt, I recently came into possession of some Star Wars cookie cutters by way of Williams Sonoma. And it was SO ON. 

I used my family’s classic sugar cookie recipe, known as Mom’s Sugar Cookies (referring to my maternal great-grandmother). Everything proceeds as normal: cream the butter and sugar, add eggs and vanilla, and then the dry ingredients, followed by chilling the dough for two hours. And then the fun part: rolling out the dough and cutting the cookies!

You can pause for a lightsaber battle using your rolling pin if you like.