Well, it’s the first day of a brand new year, and I’m going to kick it off with… stuff from before Christmas.

I had meant ages ago to post a sort of photo-illustrated entry on how to make “The A-hole Cookies,” as my mother so lovingly calls the plain white cookies with icing that we have made and cut for Christmas as long as I can really remember.  The tradition had sort of fallen by the wayside after I left home for New York, since they are rather labor intensive for any one person to undertake by their lonesome, but I have enjoyed a renewed commitment to tradition in my life of late, and therefore wanted to make them for Christmas this year.

It might also have had something to do with the fact that my boss is a champion cookie-maker, and I am very competitive.  Maybe.

Anyway, here goes:

“The A-hole Cookies” are effectively just sweetened pie crust.  You cut shortening into flour and moisten with buttermilk and vanilla, and mix in some sugar.  Then you roll it out with copious amounts of flour, and cut.

A wee little reindeer

You line a billion of these up on a cookie sheet, and bake them for about five seconds.  They are so thin that they bake in no time, and it’s really the one part that necessitates a second chef–you need someone to keep watch and make sure they don’t burn.  Mr. Boyfriend served as photoarchivist, DJ, and oven watchdog for this particular undertaking.

When you’ve cut and baked through all the dough, there will be a lot of cookies.  The yield I have written for the recipe says 5 dozen.  I had 10.  I think it really depends on how thin you roll them out.

That's a lot of cookies. And there are more behind the camera.

The spray bottle on the table is not technically cookie-related.  It is our disciplinary tool for Cougar the Kitten, who has a penchant for jumping on the table, where she is not allowed.  While her presence on the table would have been disastrous to the icing process to follow, I think she was actually too exhausted by all the labor taking place around her to do much of anything but sleep.

She's not broken. She always sleeps like that.

After you get all the cookies laid out on waxed paper to cool, and have taken sufficient time for yourself and your fellow chefs to rest their feet and calm their nerves with a pull of bourbon, it’s time to ice.  This part takes even longer than the rolling and cutting.  It’s incredible.  We did three batches of icing for 120 cookies, and our colors were green, red, white, blue, and yellow.

The finished product! And the one little heart and a glass of milk, for me. As payment for sacrificing a whole Saturday to the Sugar Gods.

So there you have it.  Christmas trees, Santa with his pack (the red ones), bells (the yellow ones) and holly leaves (the spiky green ones).  Not pictured are the reindeer and the angels, which were white and blue, respectively.  The one nice thing about this recipe is that the yield makes it totally reasonable to give lots away, because there will always be more.  We still have a dozen or so now, three weeks after the fact.  And while they do tend to get stale pretty quickly if you don’t store them in an airtight container (waxed paper between the layers keeps them from sticking to each other)…

Me, stuffing my face and giving a displeased look to my photographer for chronicling such an unattractive moment.

They are certainly delicious.

So there, that is The Story of the A-hole Cookies.  I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

In site-related news, I realize that the tabs on that nifty little box over on the right aren’t working properly.  I think there’s a conflict between the JavaScript that runs my Twitter box and that one, so I need to sit down and rig some kind of fix for it.  Thanks for your patience!