The things I learned from two straight nights of baking Christmas cookies.

1. When a recipe calls for a cup of dry roasted pistachios, chopped… do your damndest to find pistachios that have already been shelled.  It seriously cuts into your time when you have to shell a whole cup of them, and THEN chop them!!
2. When the recipe tells you to bake for a certain amount of time, just trust them.  I over-did it with two batches of  cookies last night, just because I didn’t think they looked ready.  I was very wrong.  It’s better to be a lil gooey in the middle than too crispy.
3. When the recipe calls for you to drop heaping tablespoonfuls on to the cookie sheet, don’t do it.  Roll them into balls, then flatten a bit with your fingertips.  Makes a much prettier, more uniform-looking cookie.
4. When you make refrigerated dough rolled or shaped into logs, those end bits aren’t meant to be baked – they are meant to be eaten raw.
5. I don’t care if eating raw cookie dough is bad for me.  Not in the slightest.
6. If you’re counting cals, make sure to pre-allocate for a few taste-tests.  (I did not pre-allocate.  Which means I went way over my calories for two days in a row.  Whoops.)
7. You can TRY to trick your expert-baker-mother into believing your Cran-Pistachio cookies are completely homemade, but it won’t work.  She will definitely still be able to tell if there’s a whole package of Betty Crocker Sugar Cookie mix in there.
8. I don’t care what Mom thinks, I still 100% feel that the Cran-Pistachio cookies were my favourite out of all four varieties that I baked.  Betty Crocker-based or not.
9. You can search high and low for new and different kinds of cookies, but none of them – absolutely none of them – will ever trump any of you mom’s tried-and-trues.  Trust me.   I’ve tried.
10. Parchment paper is your friend.
11. Don’t worry that the parchment paper will go up in flames in the oven.  It won’t.  (Even though I still don’t understand how it doesn’t.)
12. Wax paper doesn’t work the same way.
13. It is really, really hard to “gently swirl” melted chocolate into a chocolate chip cookie dough to give it a marble effect.  In fact, I consider it quite impossible.
14. Get those suckers into the freezer pronto or else you might eat them all in one night.  And if you are like me… you might also want to consider then pad-locking the freezer.
15. Doesn’t matter if it’s the Biebs or Elvis, having a little Christmas music in the background makes the baking so much more enjoyable!

Next week, I will move on to swirling things into melted chocolate (ie, bark and fudge).  And I am sure more lessons will be learned.

Happy Turkey Day, my American pals.  I’m totally jeal!!!