Guess what today is?

It's Christmas cookie day! I am making around seven different kinds of cookies today -- several tried and true recipes and a few new ones. The old favorites: Kiss cookies, cut-out cookies, and raspberry meringue cookies. Ones that I've made before: orange-chocolate biscotti. Brand-spankin'-new cookies: chocolate-cherry shortbread, chocolate-chip shortbread, cranberry-chocolate-covered-raisin-and-peanut cookies, snickerdoodle pinwheels, and orange meringue cookies. Actually, that's nine kinds of cookies. I am insane. But I've got lots of dough in the fridge ready to be rolled out and shaped. I'm putting off making cut-out cookies because they're the most time consuming, but also probably my favorite.

So far I've already made the snickerdoodle pinwheels, which are quite tasty although not quite as pinwheel-y as I would've liked. Next time I will remember to chill the dough before I roll it out. Then I think it'll roll up a little bit better. And I made chocolate-cherry shortbread, which didn't really turn out. I used dried cherries, and I should've chopped them up. But I will probably give some of it to Trip and his roommate and other not-as-descriminating people and I'm sure it'll be good. But the chocolate chips that I put in there were quite delicious, so I'm definitely making another batch with just chocolate chips.

And there's a batch of raspberry meringue cookies in the over as I type. I had some orange jello, so I thought the combination of orange and chocolate would be delicious and Christmasy. I loved the chocolate oranges that I got in England, although I guess they do sell them here now. But my choices were rather limited -- it was either orange or lime. I think orange is definitely a better choice.

Right, so I've got twenty-minutes before I can fire up the oven for the orange meringue cookies. Time to get whipping those eggs!