It's A Christmas Cake

Merry Christmas!

Granted, there is nothing particularly Christmas-y about this cake, except that I was inspired to put it together for Christmas dinner. I was talking to my friend Chloe earlier this week, and she said she was making this Chocolate Peanut Butter cake from Smitten Kitchen. I was blanking on other possible dessert ideas. Also this seemed like a good reason to make a cake, I don't really make cakes out at school, because serving and portability are always such issues. But it's Christmas, so I went all out. And let me say, this cake is worth it.

I was a little skeptical about the frosting, I wasn't sure how it would taste. Turns out this may be my new favorite frosting. It's basically cream cheese frosting (my favorite frosting) with some peanut butter blended in.

Christmas Cookies

I've been wanting to make these cookies for weeks. If forced to pick a favorite cookie, mine just might be a butter cookie with royal icing. Of course these are labor intensive, and I was seriously lacking in time to attempt such a project.

But there was an unexpected lull in my end of the semester crunch, and I wanted to give these cookies as a thank-you gift to my phd application recommendation writers.

I've attempted baking these kind of cookies twice before. The first time, with a recipe from Baked they were sort of a mess. Tasted fine, but sort of messy. The second time with a recipe from Joe Pastry - which turned out really well. But I needed a lot of cookies, and doubling ounces from Joe's blog looked like a bad idea.

And then TheKitchn went on about how these are the best butter cookies, ever. The recipe uses an obscene amount of butter, so of course I knew they would be amazing. Coincidentally it also made an obscene amount of cookies. On Friday I needed more cookies, and I was low on flour, so I quartered the recipe and it worked splendidly. Also I found this dough the easiest to roll out of the three recipes I've tried. Highly recommend. Finished cookie below: precision frost-er I am not.