One of the staples of Christmas time for me has been the cookies my mom makes & bakes for the holiday season. Her usual cookies include rumballs and hedgehogs, and there’s a third cookie of random choice and origin she usually throws in there as well. Rumballs are self-explanatory… Nothing like a little ball of chocolate & nuts that taste like they’ve been doused in some spiced rum! Hedgehogs are made with nuts, dates, brown sugar & coconut. They’re a little on the unorthodox side as far as “cookies” go, but I’ve loved them growing up. The last several years included me helping her form the rumballs and making cute little platters of the cookies to give to family & friends as easy, delicious gifts.

I’ve kept the tradition alive in the way that I baked some cookies. Regular chocolate chip cookies from scratch, à la Alton Brown! The recipe I’ve used yields some awesomely chewy cookies¹, but each time I’ve made them, it takes one test batch before I can come out with a batch that looks, tastes like and has the right texture that the recipe is supposed to give. My first batch ended up being a little flat, too dark and a little too crispy. I almost forgot to add in the brown & regular sugar, for starters! One of the things about Alton Brown recipes is the order in which ingredients are mixed in together – and he explains why². I also hand-mixed everything³ and I didn’t chill the dough long enough. See?

The 2nd batch turned out much better since I mixed the ingredients in relatively the correct order, picked up and used a hand mixer, and chilled the dough for quite enough time⁴. As you can see, they’re much more chocolate chip cookie-looking See?

Since chocolate chip cookies are pretty much your every day type of cookie, I came up with the awesome idea of dressing them a little more for the Christmas season with a ring of white icing and dipped in holly berry sprinkles, which makes it look like there’s a little Christmas wreath on them. I don’t like cookies with a lot of icing on them, so I went with something minimal but effective. Pretty much every bite will provide just a tad of the sprinkles & icing but not too much that it’d overwhelm. I’ve never been a fan of icing or frosting on anything, really, for that matter. I usually scrape off the icing on cupcakes or eat around it when it comes to a slice of cake.

BTW, the only camera I have is the one on my Blackberry, so I don’t have awesome food porn-type shots to give you But I’m sure you’ll enjoy looking at these yummy cookies regardless of photo quality. And now you know what to give me as a gift if you have an extra unused camera lying around that needs a new home I don’t even consider myself an amateur photographer, so any camera would do