Lots of Christmas Cookies

Pin It now! I went home to NJ this wekeend and my mom and I made lots and lots of Christmas cookies.  When we first started, we were excited and thought we should do this all the time and could even start a business.  Yeah right!  By the sixth hour, we had rolled, chilled, and baked so many balls of cookie dough (and then rolled and chilled some more dough) that the idea of starting a cookie business was completely gone.  It was fun though!  We made Chestnut cookies (smitten kitchen's recipe here), Vanilla Sugar Cookies (foodnetwork recipe here) and Gingerbread cookies (the Neely's foodnetwork recipe here).  Even with all the labor-intesive work, the cookies came out really good and perfectly pretty.  Some notes on the cookie recipes... Chestnut cookies: Use more than 1 cup of chopped chestnuts.  I put in 1 1/4 cups and it still wasn't chestnutty enough.  I think 2 cups+ would make it taste stronger.  If you make munchin-sized cookie balls like we did, you need to bake them at least 25 minutes.  I suggest making the balls smaller and the 14-17 minute cooking time would work.  Gingerbread cookies:  Lots more ground ginger!  The recipe says 1 Tb, but I think 1-2 extra tablespoons would make it more ginger-y.  Also, use royal icing for the cookie decoration.  We used some gel pack from the supermarket for a few cookies and the icing never tried.  I used the royal icing at the end of the cookie recipe and piped it with a pastry piping bag and (after practicing on a few cookies), the decorating came out perfectly.