I had a lunch late last month with a friend and we had a lot of fun catching up and talking about Christmas cookies. She told me about how she’d love to make sugar cookies and try to make meringues again. She told me about her trials before of batches thrown out and puddles of meringue not lived up to the Pinterest pictures. I was totally up to the challenge, I had felt the same woes before in my attempts to make french macarons, which still have much room for improvement.

Leaving that lunch the idea of a Christmas cookie baking day was born and oh am I over ambitious. With five cookies on the list to bake a few of them taking time for the dough to chill or an hour in the oven and then underestimating how much time to decorate, let’s say we only got about 2 1/2 cookie recipes done. The 1/2 being how much got decorated by the end of the day.

One of the bakers I admire online is Cupcake Jemma and she offers a couple of YouTube videos that provide tips and tricks for creating great meringues. To top it off she put out a video on creating Christmas tree meringues just recently that definitely helped us out, talk about great timing! Check out her channel and the video here.

With tips and tricks and especially the visualize we were quite happy without meringue Christmas trees. They came out crispy on the outside and mallow-y on the inside. Delicious. Just to test myself, to see if I really could get them right a second time, I made another batch this time as candy cane trees!

What Christmas desserts have you been baking?

Sweetly,

Gwenlynn