An Accomplished Woman: Holiday Planning #2 and Menu Week Ending December 9th.

This week, I am finishing decorating as the hubby comes on Friday and we are decorating outside this weekend. My gifts are wrapped and ready for Christmas. This is the last week of teaching and I am ready to put 100 percent into the holiday season.

So this week is dedicated to baking or rather cookie dough making. I have two little girls coming next week to decorate cookies. They are super excited but I am more excited than they are to decorate cookies. My favorite memories of my children and their friends is decorating cookies.

Baking Christmas Cookies:

We start with putting all the dry ingredients together in Ziploc bags.
The next step is to prepare the bags and wax paper to put the cookie dough in once it is prepared.
The night before, I lay out the eggs and butter so it will be room temperature by the morning.
Thursday morning, I will start with the lightest cookie dough and work to the darkest cookie dough. For example, start with the sugar cookie dough, next snicker doodles, heath cookies, chocolate chip up to the chocolate cookie. Why? Because if you have a bowl scraper, you do not need to wash the bowl between cookies. WHAT!!! No I do not wash between the cookies. The bowl scraper does an excellent job of getting rid of all the cookie dough. I do not even wash the beater. Shocking… I know.
Lastly, I wrap the cookie dough into rolls in wax paper. Then store them in Ziploc bags in the freezer. This way I have cookie dough ready to bake on December 23^rd. We deliver fresh cookies on December 24^th. I put the recipes in the Ziploc bags so we can easily bake them. My ovens can bake 6 trays at a time.
I am also making all the Chex party mix, spicy pecans and half of the marshmallows this week. I deliver marshmallows to all the employees of my favorite hair salon, postmen and delivery men. They are so funny and look forward to this special treat. During the holiday season, I make 10 double batches of marshmallows.