Christmas Cookie Advent

I stated and gave up within a week. I was going to bake a new cookie recipe everyday from Saveur's cookie advent calendar. When I started this plan I wasn't thinking, obviously. I do bake often, but not everyday. It got to be a little crazy and not quite as much fun as it should have been, so I decided to drop the idea. I did find a couple good new recipes that I'll share with you though.

These brown sugar cookies are my favorite of the experiment. They're from Cooks Illustrated, not Saveur ( I decided to be flexible in my list). To give you an idea of how good they are I'll share an example. Tuesday night  Kyle and I made 5 dozen of these for my family (7 people including us). In the morning maybe 10 were left. If you need a last minute holiday treat, make these. They'll take you an hour for one batch (including browning butter, mixing and cooking) and they're my current favorite cookie. If you like caramel flavor, brown sugar and overall deliciousness these are the cookies for you. You can find the recipe here. I highly recommend the dark brown sugar, but I'm sure they'd be good with light, but not as caramely.

These other cookies are from the actual cookie advent. Of them, my favorite is the Drömkakor (pictured above) or Swedish Dream Cookie. They are light are crumbly and melt in your mouth. If you don't have vanilla sugar you can use the same amount of regular sugar and a few drops of vanilla extract.

Here the Swedish dream cookies are pictured with some coconut cookies which were also good but not as much as the other ones.

These are caramel crumb bars. They're pretty good, but next time I'd double the caramel layer.

Merry Christmas Eve! And happy baking to you and yours!