Linking up for Blogmas 2014…25 Days of Christmas. Because I LOVE Christmastime…still waiting for snow!! 🙂

I really do enjoy baking for the holidays, and my family looks forward to eating all of our favorites.  The kids do help with decorating them, and my youngest is the official taste tester, or as he calls himself the test taster.  Special thanks to my daughter, who took all these pictures.  She was getting into it after awhile wanting to capture the details and textures of the cookies.

Green Trees – Using a Mirro Cookie press.  Which is a silver gun like contraption that you fill with dough, and there is a tree stencil at the bottom, and you press out cookies from it.  This was my mom’s and we used it when we were little, the cookies are delicious.

Sugar Cookies – rolled out dough, and we use cookie cutters for the various shapes, and decorate them with sugars.  These can also be frosted.

Chocolate Filled Snowballs – A Hershey kiss covered in a flaky nut filled cookie, covered in powdered sugar.  These are by far my favorite.

Roshky – A polish cookie that is light and flaky and is filled with nut filling,  apricot or plum butter filling.  These take some time to make.  Also considered a Slovak cookie and also called Kolaczki.  I was only able to make the nut and apricot ones this year since I could not find the plum butter filling, which are my favorite.  I was questioning my ethnicity as I was making these, because the first couple of batches did not turn out like that should have.  You have to pinch the two corners together in the middle, and a lot of mine were popping open in the oven, UGH!!  They are edible, just not pretty to look at, lol.  But my Polish eventually kicked in, and the later batches were much better.

Peanut Butter Blossoms – peanut butter cookie with a chocolate star in the middle.  Usually this recipe uses Hershey kisses, but this year I thought the chocolate stars might be better, and I think they are.

Seven Layer Bars – Seven layers of sweet goodness:  butter, graham cracker crumbs, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, coconut, walnuts and sweetened condensed milk.

This is what I baked this past weekend, and now I am all set for the holidays.  Every day my kids ask to eat just one, but I know how quickly one turns into two and so forth. But I admit to sneaking some for myself when they aren’t looking, lol.  I will probably let them have a few before the holidays, but they are mainly for cookie trays that we like to put out when we have family or friends over during the holiday season.