A Nice Change in Scenery

This blog is supposed to be about cooking good, fast, cheap food in a college apartment. I am a Biotech major, so I'm busy beyond all reason, and get asked how I find the time and money to cook. So, it's blog time...

But, alas, the first chance I have to post and I am not in my college apartment. I'm in Colorful Colorado until after the New Year.

This means no quick dinners for the boyfriend and myself, no friend's birthdays giving me a prefect reason to make a cake, and no early morning classes to prepare breakfast for on the weekends.

But with this lack of a college scene, comes a bit of time to make Christmas cookies. I receive with my present from my good friend Amber several awesome cookie recipes, so I decided to jump in and try one. Just a simple sugar cookie recipe - from Pillsbury - but my loving friend Amber modified it.

So, off I run to my mother's kitchen, armed with a real stand mixer (something our apartment is lacking) to try it out...

Amber's Sugar Cookies

• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup butter (softened)
• 3 oz of cream cheese
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon almond extract
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (I didn't have almond extract, so I used 1 teaspoon of vanilla)
• 1 egg yolk 
• 2 cups of flour

1. In large bowl, (I got to use the lovely stand mixer for this. Happy Panda.) combine all ingredients except the flour. Beat until light and fluffy.
2. Add the flour and mix well. This took my dough a while, but Colorado does have an altitude problem...
3. Shape dough into 3 disks, wrap in whatever packing material you have handy, I used plastic wrap, and refrigerate for at least an hour if you want any hope in the world for them to roll our properly.
4. Preheat oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit. If you try and use Celsius, please show me your oven, cause that would be a pretty epic oven.
5. On a flour surface, roll our one disk of your dough to a little more than an 1/8 on an inch think. (The original recipe said an 1/8 of an inch, and I got very, very thin cookies.)
6. Cut out into whatever shapes you want. I used a circle cutter because I believe my mother got rid of all of the other cookie cutters.
7. Bake for 6-10 minutes, or until golden brown. (I like my cookies chewy, so I only baked mine until I very mostly certain I wouldn't die of salmonella from the egg.)
8. Frost or decorate with whatever you wish, and enjoy. (My sister loves store bought icing... It's a solid idea.)

This is a picture of the final product... after my family had eaten several. I know, I know, boring decorating job. Hey, I'm on break. I didn't want to spend 3 hours decorating cookies. Sue me.

These cookies are amazingly tender, sweet, and the dough came together in no time. They take a little too much effort with the rolling and cutting, not to mention the extra equipment that took to make in a college kitchen, but it nice to splurge a little at home.

Tasty, tasty cookies. :)