Holiday Baking Prep

Every year I get really excited to bake Christmas cookies. I buy all the ingredients and the little decorative stuff to put on them, I look at pictures and I scan recipes. And then I end up buying pre-made dough and doing as little work as possible. It's a method that really seems to work well for me so I'm going to stick with it.

This year, I'm even taking my work down a notch. Instead of traditional cookies I'm going to do cookie cups; baking the dough in a mini muffin pan, and filling the little center depression with something yummy and sweet

Since I've already started stocking up on pre-made dough I decided to test out the mini-muffin tins to see how much dough it will take to make the proper sized cup. Turns out that the Pillsbury Refrigerated Cookie Dough, the Ready To Bake ones, are the perfect size. For the peanut butter cookies, I tried the Toll House bulk dough.  I used a hunk of dough about the same size as the pre-made sugar cookies.




I rolled the dough into balls then used my thumb to make a depression in the middle before setting it into the muffin tin and gently pressing it around the edges.

I baked them for about 9 minutes at 375 degrees then let them cool in the tins for about 10-15 minutes before taking them out. You want them to retain their cup shape and if you take them out of the tin too early they might lose their pretty shape!

Now that I've got my method down I'm going to start brain storming what cookie combos I want to make! Yummy!

What kind of holiday baking are you going to do?