Welcome to my cookie bake-a-thon.
Aside from a few years in grad school, when mountains of papers that demanded grading trumped my heart's desire to bake cookies in the weeks before Christmas, I've been making cookie boxes for friends and neighbors for over a decade. I love doing it. The tradition started out simply enough, with just one kind of cookie, when I was new to the whole thing; over the years it's grown into a multi-batch affair, an assortment of 5 or 6 varieties of the very best recipes that I could find that weren't too daunting to make, but were still beautiful and a bit different. Collecting these recipes has taken a lot of (admittedly enjoyable) research. Every year I plan to make a little recipe booklet to include with the boxes so other people can make them too. That would be very Martha of me, wouldn't it? But it never happens. Thankfully, a few blog posts will do the trick.
