Cookies for Christmas

Hey look! I made cookies yesterday.

I don't know what inspired me to bake the day after getting my H1N1 shot because OW my arm hurts but I guess I just had too much to do. Today is officially Blame the H1N1 Shot Day. As in: "I'd love to help unload the dishwasher, but I can't really lift my arm up right now. Sorry!"

In any case, I made four kinds of cookies yesterday - shortbread cookies (left), soft chocolate cookies (middle), pistachio orange cookies (right), and pfefferneuse, which are hiding under the pistachio cookies.

Everything kind of went a little bit wrong yesterday - we didn't have any eggs (my sister and her husband made piroshky the day before, messed up the dough and had to start over, using up double the eggs they'd planned), I forgot to buy pistachios, I used wheat flour instead of white (I'm sorry, but health be damned: I'd rather my christmas cookies have as little nutritive value as possible, if it means they taste like they're meant to) on two of the batches of cookies, I snapped a wooden spoon in half mixing the pfefferneuse dough. Our oven is cooking 50 degrees hot. Ugh.

Anyway, the two cookies with whole wheat flour taste okay, but are a touch drier than they should be. I maybe should have added a bit more liquid or else just taken them out of the oven a little earlier, but they don't taste too far off the mark. Or not so far off that I wouldn't give them away. The pistachio cookies are a bit too salty. They're meant to be kind of salty-sweet like a chocolate dipped pretzel, but they're just a touch too hardcore salty. Sigh.

Everything else is basically as they should be. Thank goodness, because I gave these three small boxes to one friend, a bigger box to my boss, and tomorrow I'm leaving another bigger box for my various managers and whoever comes into their office. I didn't want to buy more useless trinkets for people, so, you know. Food.

Anyway, if anyone wants recipes, leave a comment. They're all already typed up, which means they're all pretty easy to reproduce here. I won't even blame it on H1N1 shots if it takes me a while, it'd just be outright laziness.