Butter Bash 2025

Year 2 of our family holiday cookie baking bonanza is in the books. And wow, if I thought we went through a lot of butter last year...

This year's shopping totals:
17 sticks of butter
6.5 cups of sugar
19 cups of flour
8 eggs
4.5 cups powdered sugar
...and less insane quantities of many other ingredients.

We baked 6, instead of last year's 7, items this go round:

Linzer cookies made 'em a little smaller this year, in the shapes of stars. :)

Millionaire's Shortbread Bars but good lord, why is the caramel layer SO challenging??!!

Snowballs a nostalgic classic my family just can't not have

Orange Cranberry White Chocolate Chip Cookies these are something special

Soft Gingerbread Cookies with Maple Glaze wowwww you should have seen what a disaster I was trying to sub out the maple glaze for a white chocolate ganache. I mean, the maple glaze from the recipe is good--it just doesn't set very well. I shouldn't have tried to stray, I ended up back at the original recipe for the glaze.

Checkerboard cookies I... can't even talk about these. The way I royally messed these up. How? I don't know, but they turned from individual cookies to one mass cookie sheet cookie and... UGH.

So there you have it, holiday baking fun, with some swearing and sweating, with my mom wearing half a cup of flour on her shirt, with my brother casually turning out the best bakes, with my dad wandering up from watching football ever so often just to see what was going on, with the boys semi helping and very much tasting everything available, with an insane kitchen mess we're still digging out of. 

We'll make up several plates of these treats to deliver to neighbors and friends. Otherwise tins of leftovers will live in the garage freezer (you know, just the corner of any Midwest garage in December) for general holiday snacking. :)