It’s been a busy/rough/exhausting couple of weeks. Work has been hectic–extra hours before and after work and public meetings at night–so I haven’t gotten to do anything crafty and I’ve hardly done any writing. I have a desktop calendar that I started just last month to track my personal goals and December is looking pretty sad, filled with lots of frowny faces. I didn’t want to break the good habit of writing every day that I developed in November with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), but lately I’ve just been too exhausted to care.
In the plus column, I have made sure to stick to my half-marathon running plan, which has been going great! Another eight miles down this morning (that’s eight miles all in one session, without stopping, which is huge for me!).
Another accomplishment this past week was getting all my gifts wrapped and shipped (seriously, that takes forever!). Plus, this year was the first year I designed holiday cards to send out. I haven’t sent holiday cards in a long time and I figured I needed to start doing things like that again. It’s difficult when everyone has cute babies and families to put on their cards, but we did a lot of traveling this year, so I filled our card with pictures from our trips to five out-of-state weddings and other family events this year.
With getting all this holiday stuff done early, I figured this weekend I’d get to sit back, relax, and maybe take a few naps, but one of my sweet friends invited me to a get together tomorrow. Which turned out to be a cookie exchange. Which turned out requiring each of us bringing 5 dozen cookies. Eek. For me, that’s a lot. We were told to make our favorite cookie–hello, that’s definitely monster cookies! But my monster cookies always come out crispy and hardly last a day or two.
I found this recipe for soft baked monster cookies on Sally’s Baking Addiction and did a test batch last night. I immediately decided that it was a failure because the cookies turned out so small. The dough was delicious though. Well, we fell asleep on the couch and, out of sheer exhaustion, I left the cookies out overnight. Somehow, the next day they were still soft AND they tasted great! So I decided to use a large cookie scoop to fix the tiny cookie problem and the next few batches turned out pretty good!
The recipe calls for flattening the cookies with a spoon after you take them out of the oven because they don’t spread, but I used a spatula and that worked much better to get a uniform top. Below is a picture comparing a flattened (back pan) and unflattened pan fresh out of the oven (front). They look underdone but they’re definitely not! Three batches of this dough made a little over six dozen.
Hope your holidays are going well!
-Anna
I would eat 20 of them. Right now. Yummmmmmmmmm.
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