Woodland Critter Christmas Cookies

I have so much to report from Woodland Critter Christmas! Let's start with the most important item: the cookies. Every year, I make two favorite recipes-- Chocolate Almond Parsons' Hats and Raspberry Candy Canes. They're both from the oldest Christmas cookie magazine in the history of America, which my mom still owns. We got it in the checkout aisle of the grocery store one million years ago and we haven't looked back. You might come from a family in which a lot of items are purchased in the checkout aisle, but I do not. This magazine was a magor thrill, which is probably why I still adore paging through it every single Christmas. One year I followed a recipe in the magazine and made an entire sleigh out of gingerbread, featuring little stained glass panels in the back made of crushed hard candy which melted in the oven. But that was when I had a lot more time on my hands.

This year, for our Woodland Critter Christmas theme, I used the cookies I was already making and created some thematic treats out of the same dough. The parsons' hat dough, plus some slivered almonds, became hedgehog cookies.

Before baking:


After baking, alongside some of the original recipe parsons' hats:

Some of the candy cane dough became a bird and a little bear's head. The bear was meant to be peeking out from behind a log, but I think he was eaten long before that could happen. Here are the bird and bear with a whole herd of hedgehogs: