If you aren't hungry now, you will be by the end of this post.

The past few weeks have been plenty busy, with briefs to write and file, trips of various sorts to take, and holiday shopping to accomplish. Suddenly, our Christmas journey to Middle America is but a few days away.

This will be my first Christmas with Steve's family, and my first real Christmas celebration in almost a decade. So there is no way in hell I'm showing up without cookies.

My recent and forthcoming schedule being what it is, I had only today to produce a suitable variety and quantity of sweet treats. I started early with the ruggelach (having made the dough at midnight last night, after returning from a most excellent evening with friends).

I grew up making my mother's (and grandmother's) recipe for these classic Jewish cookies, and hers are mighty delicious. But a year or two ago, I discovered Ina Garten's version (in the Barefoot Contessa Parties cookbook, should you wonder). As sacrilegious as it may sound to say so, they are better than mom's (though she disagrees), absolutely To Die For. I tweak them a bit here and there - soaking the raisins in wine to plump them, substituting fig spread for the apricot jam and pecans for walnuts in half the batch - but for the most part, I follow Ina's excellent advice.

While my little rolled-up yummies were chilling, I began preparing my famous Chocolate Crinkle Cookies.

These are utterly decadent - Scharffenberger's dark chocolate, melted with a bit of butter, then added to a batter including both cocoa powder and semi-sweet chocolate chips. And eggs, and sugar, and flour, and . . . yep, they're tasty (and I don't even like chocolate!). This dough, too, needs to chill before the cookies can be made, so I transferred the gooey stuff to a bowl and handed the KitchenAid bowl, the beater, and my spatula to Steve, who pre-cleaned them with his tongue.

While the chocolate was melting for the crinkle cookies, I toasted sliced almonds for the Almond Butter Wafers. Then, when the chocolate dough was chilling, the ruggelach safely out of the oven and cooling, and the KitchenAid clean, I started all over.

Again, I mixed flour, butter, sugar, eggs, this time with almond extract and the toasted nuts. I then rolled the sweet-almond-smelling dough into a log, wrapped it in plastic, and found it some space in the refrigerator. Alas, I have no photos of this step in the proceedings, because Steve left to run errands and my hands were much too sticky to handle the camera!

My friend Sasha arrived just in time to roll crinkles. We filled baking sheets with little balls of dough rolled in confectioner's sugar, and chatted away as we rotated cookies through the oven.

As the finished cookies began to cool, we piled them up on a plate, trying hard to resist gobbling them up in the process.

Next, it was time to take the Almond Butter log from the fridge and slice it into cookies. Once again, my shiny new Santoku knife proved indispensable, and in no time at all, I had two sheets full of oh-so-thin wafers ready to bake.

These are a new addition, taken from my mother via a friend, but I expect they will become a staple of my baking repertoire. I loved the smell of the dough as I worked with it, I loved the way the almonds looked in the unbaked slices, I loved the crisp and golden look of the finished cookies, and, best of all, I loved the delicious, toasted-almond taste.

I suppose I could have stopped at this point, but I was on a roll (and a spoon-and-finger-licking-induced sugar high). On an internet site I frequent, I'd seen a great recipe for quick, flourless, peanut-butter-chocolate-chip cookies. Pretty much anything involving peanut butter makes me happy, and these sounded like the perfect complement to shapes and flavors I'd already produced.

True to their billing, these cookies were ridiculously easy to make. It took me barely 10 minutes to produce this:

And in just 12 more, I had these:

And then, I stopped, stiff-hipped from standing for hours, bloated and jittery from the nibbles, but utterly satisfied with my endeavors.

The only casualty of the day was one of Steve's cherished Packer Glasses, which I used to mix egg-wash and managed to crack.

When I suggested that perhaps the ruined glass was symbolic of the Packers' less-than-stellar season, Steve was not amused. He, by the way, spent much of the afternoon in the basement, building the bookshelves that will someday liberate our library from the 30-some-odd boxes in which it has been stored for the past 15 months.

Aren't we quite the non-traditional couple?

Comments

[Tim]

I'm lucky I just ate or I'd probably be eating too many of the few cookies that are around here. I say "few" because we haven't made that much progress yet on cookies. My wife and I are a musician and a lawyer, and we've both been swamped with work lately. I hope we can get at least a bit more baking done between now and Friday -- we're traveling to Wisconsin, too, to visit my family in Madison.

Oh, I don't think I've introduced myself. I found your blog several months ago by way of Sherry Fowler's, which I found I don't even remember how long ago. I work in Denver and live in Broomfield.

[michelle]

"Pretty much anything involving peanut butter makes me happy"

I feel that way too about PB. And chocolate. And nuts. And...

Karl and I went snowshoeing near Eldora yesterday and thought about you guys. Were wondering if you were out XC skiing. We only did two miles but that was plenty for me for now.

[StacyG]

Ha! We ahve the same dishes. The blue ones. I ahve the whole set and love them but they get really hot in the microwave. Of course, mine are never ever covered with the yummy looking goodies yours are! Yum!!

[Carolyn Elefant]

Thank you so much for the pictures of the rugelach. My grandmother made the exact same kind. But these days, the rugelach sold in the stores look different - and I was starting to think that I had only imagined the crescent-shaped ones. Now, if someone in my family could only find the recipe for her onion cookies (sounds gross, but they were really good)