Holiday Baking, drinking and shopping lists

I had decided to get really domestic and make sweets for the Holidays as gifts. You know those tins of 4-89 types of cookies in each tin? Well, I had 5 different things in mine. And this past weekend was the weekend to bake. I had decided to make enough cookies to fill 12 tins. (Seriously, what was I thinking???)

I gave myself time to do this on Saturday and Sunday. I had cleared my schedule. But I had forgotten about one thing: we had pizza and game night with friends on Friday night. This particular Friday, my coworker, Neely (and her husband, Jason and her kids) were coming. And this changed my plans. Saturday was no longer for baking cookies. Being that we were all up to 4:30 am drinking...needless to say, no baking was done on Saturday. Saturday was a day for quiet reflection (code for having a hangover headache) and lots of 7up.

So Sunday was all about baking. From 8:00 am until 6:00 pm...nonstop.

I am mighty pleased with my recipe choices. Everything came out great and it was all super easy. I am especially pleased with the MICROWAVABLE FUDGE. That's right...you can easily make fudge in the microwave. And it's good...really good! I'm also just as pleased with the meringues. SUPER EASY to make, almost no calories and it is all just sweet goodness.

Here are the links to the recipes in case you are wanting to make any of these:

Strfuolli
Microwave fudge
Thumbprint cookies
Meringues
Shortbread

And now to tell you about the most amazing feature on a website I have ever encountered! Allrecipes.com has a fantastic selection of recipes, I frequently get recipes from there because they are rated and reviewed by real people. I like that. But the most amazing feature is their "Shopping List" feature. You can change the number of servings for each recipe and it will change the amount of ingredients, right...not so ground-breaking but useful. But then you can add the recipe to your shopping list. And you can add another recipe and it will build in all of the same ingredient amounts to your list and break it down by shopping area category. So you can put together a 7 course meal and have only one shopping list. AWESOME! (Ok, geeky, but still awesome!)

And that is all I have for now.