Happy holidays..

How lucky we are... We had snow on Christmas Eve.

We played in the snow, made a small snow man, baked and decorated cookies for Santa, had a nice quite dinner with the kids, and enjoyed watching the Christmas tree and the snow.


We made shortbread cookies with the kids. We decorated some of them with icing and colored sugar. This is a great recipe that tastes good and has great consistency. It is from a good friend of mine who lives in London right now...

Shortbread cookies

1 cup softened butter
1/2 cup corn starch
1/2 cup powdered sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups of flour

Beat butter until creamy, not oily. Combine all dry ingredients and sift four times. Slowly add dry ingredients to the butter. Mix it well (I used my kitchen aid in slow mode). Roll out to 1/3 inch thickness between two wax papers, let it sit in the refrigerator for 45 minutes, cut with cookie cutters. Bake at 325 for 16 to 18 minutes

With some of dough we made cookies with hard candy (we used jolly ranchers)...


You need to cut each cookie dough with a cutter so that each cookie has an opening in the center. You put a hard candy in the center and bake it with the candy. The candy melts and fills the opening. Let it cool on the cookie sheet for minutes, then move them to a wax paper.

The only issue with the recipe was that the candy melted before the cookie was baked. I think best way to bake it is to add the candy in the last 5-6 minutes so that it would not boil over the cookie as it did in our case. It still tasted great...