Since two years, we have a new christmas tradition. On one day in December we meet with our friends and we bake christmas cookies. A lot of christmas cookies. Everyone is allowed to choose one or two recipes which is a perfect way of trying out new stuff and also a perfect and quick way to fill the cookie jars.

It also means that the oven is basically heating all day long. There is an endless loop of washing pots and dishes, the cookies are piling up everywhere on the tables and the floors and latest after two hours the air is saturated with sugar and spices. In the first year, Karsten still had the ambition to serve baked apples with marzipan and vanilla ice cream in the afternoon. What shall I say…sometimes you have to learn it the hard way. This year, we only served salad. And maybe it’ll be further reduced to wasabi peas next year.

In the evening of our marathon baking day, everyone is exhausted, hot, overfed with sugar and happy about all the different types of cookies in the jars.

This year we tried a lot of new recipes. The only all-time favorite were the black-and-white cookies by our friend (he brought the whole marathon baking to perfection by being the first to prepare his dough, then spending some concentrated time on the making and then lying back and relaxing the rest of the day).

Our other friend made nutmeg-cookies and fruit cake (though the fruit cake wasn’t finished as we run out of time after almost 8 hours of baking). Karsten decided to bake nutmeg-maple sirup cookies and Finnish pinwheels (a very interesting and challenging recipe as the dough is made out of whipped cream, flour and butter and Karsten used an inch rule to get the precise measurements of the squares…). And I made sweet chestnut doughnuts and Bethmännchen (made of marzipan, sugar, almonds and rose-water).

Well, the jars are full now. So are our stomachs. In order to get the final sugar kick, we can now watch Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on tv….