I was thinking if I should name this post ” Cookie baking from Hell”, but then I thought it would be easier to find the posting later if I put only the ” Christmas cookies”. 🙂

Long story short, I spent 8 straight hours baking sheet by sheet ( no, I don’t have one of these nice wall mounted double convection ovens I dream about…sigh) 3 varieties of cookies. At the end of the 8 hours( 275 cookies) I was sure I don’t want to see a cookie until the next Christmas. Well, that was a very short moment though, since when I tried one of the Orange Cardamom butter cookies…the whole mess in my kitchen ceased to exist!

This year due to many circumstances I am not as organized as last year, unfortunately. I made the cookies last minute and when I packed the presents for Kalin’s school and for our friends and neighbors…I forgot to take pictures of the finished packaging. I made beautiful cards and paper bags with decoration and I was so mad at myself that I didn’t remember to take pictures, but what is done is done, so here are the pictures of the actual cookies, I hope you like them.

So, this year I decided to try couple of new recipes and here they are:

1. Tannita’s Orange and Cardamom cookies
If I know one thing about Tannita it’s that she knows cookies! Every single recipe I tried from her blog turned out amazing!
The cookies have a very delicate and very flavorful taste! I was cautious at first, because I haven’t used cardamom before and I had no idea what kind or aroma it has, but I was very pleasantly surprised! The combination between orange and cardamom is heavenly!

The recipe in Bulgarian here/Ако искате да видите рецептата на български кликнете тук.

If you would like to read the recipe in English, click here.

2. My second choice was again one of Tannita’s recipes- Banana chocolate chip cookies. I made these for my birthday, but I did couple of alterations to the recipe. This recipe is so easy to make that even the kids were helping!
I love the banana flavor of the cookies and when you add the chocolate chip and the walnuts, it’s a tasty explosion. Tannita improvised to substitute the pumpkin in her ” Pumpkin cookies” recipe with banana, and it worked great! I know for a fact that couple of friends did try the recipe with other fruit too- apple sauce and mango and they said it was great.
The recipe in Bulgarian is here./Ако искате да видите рецептата на български кликнете тук.
Again, I will post the recipe in English as soon as I get Tannita’s permission to do so.

3. The 3rd recipe is mine – Easy mini tarts with Caramelized pear jam and whole pecans. I had made tons of Caramelized pear jam and I was thinking what to do with it. The kids were not fond of it, I like it, but I can’t eat that much and my husband refuses to eat sweets. So, I decided to make something with it. And I started thinking, it has to be filling, it would go very well with with walnuts or pecans…so why not mini tarts? Since I didn’t have the time to actually make the dough for it, I decided to use a regular store bought pie crust.
They were a huge hit! Even my husband who didn’t want to eat sweets couldn’t resist, so the whole box disappeared in a day!
These “mini tarts” take less than 10 minutes to make, seriously! I’ll post the recipe for you tomorrow!

So I packaged everything nice and neat for the TFN’s ( teachers-friends-neighbors) and I was good to go!
These mini Christmas tins are awesome!

Very convenient and clean!

Merry Christmas to all of you!
See you tomorrow with the mini caramelized pear tarts recipe! 🙂