It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year - Cross Post

NOTE: My dad made it obvious that this needed to be cross-posted to the food blog. So here it is.

As reported elsewhere in the family blogosphere, I spent all of yesterday over at my parents house getting prepared for the Christmas festivities. I very artfully arranged the Nativity Scene and we even made lots of progress on the Christmas tree. No family Christmas tree is complete without our old favorites, the sheep:

They're looking a little sad in their advanced age, aren't they? Then Mom and I got down to the real business of the day: making a metric ton of cookies. I had a cookie exchange at work today and needed to make 10 dozen cookies to exchange with my coworkers. I chose to make Spritz, which was going to more of an ordeal than originally anticipated. See, Mom got me this fancy new cookie press which we were all excited to try out. Except it broke (faulty, cheap plastic thing) after the first 2 dozen. 2 dozen! So I ran frantically to Target while my Mom searched frantically for her old school metal press. She won the race:

Then they go in the oven for about 6 minutes or so, at least in my mom's oven. Looking good...

Then they sit on the counter to cool. There were lots and lots and lots of cookies:

Finally we packed them up into these nifty tins that I got at Walgreens for $1.09 each. They were a steal!

Full disclosure: the original recipe for the dough said it would make 6 dozen cookies so we doubled it, thinking 12 dozen instead of 10 wouldn't be so bad - that way we could keep some for ourselves. Yeah, that turned out not to be necessary: by the time we were done, we ended up with 20 DOZEN cookies. So yeah, I gave everyone at work 1.5 dozen, left a bunch with Mom and saved 2 dozen for Andy. I may have to carefully monitor my cookie intake or I am going to be on a major sugar high for the next week and a half. Not that that would necessarily be a totally awful thing... I would have to go to the gym a lot more to compensate though...

P.S. - The recipe in full:
1) Cream together 1.5 cups butter and 1 cup sugar.
2) In a separate bowl, combine 1 egg, 2 TB milk, 1 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp almond extract. Then add to the butter/sugar mixture and beat well.
3) Mix together 4 cups flour and 1 tsp baking powder, then gradually mix into the butter/sugar combo until you have an even dough.
4) Preheat the oven to 400. Using a cookie press (quality can vary), shape cookies onto a baking sheet, spacing evenly. Bake in 400 degree oven for 6ish minutes, being careful not to burn them. The bottoms burn very quickly.
5) Allow to cool on a counter after removing from oven.
Recipe makes approximately 8ish dozen cookies.