This weekend I baked the holiday cookies- every year I make the peanut butter ones with the kisses, and a couple of others.

This year I tried the linzer cookies from the December Gourmet because they looked so pretty, and they were a huge, huge, huge, pain in the rear, as you can imagine. I am not so good at the cookies that need to be cut out into pretty shapes. However, a dusting of powdered sugar (which the recipe left out of the directions though all the cookies clearly were dusted with powdered sugar in the pictures) covers a multitude of sins, and the cookies themselves were so tender and not too sweet and it killed me to give them away.

I had thought the linzer cookies would be my disaster, but I was wrong. My disaster was the pistachio macaroons from How To Be A Domestic Goddess. First, I am never shelling that many pistachios for anyone. Second, I think I have some sort of egg white skill deficiency- the macaroons (which I got so excited about when I learned they didn't contain coconut- I thought macaroons had to have coconut, which I hate, and these SOUNDED delicious) deflated out of the oven and turned to mush. They were delicious, but they fell apart as I spread the buttercream on them (with more pistachios in it that I had shelled for naught) and were gross looking green lumps. Which I totally ate, but which I would be ashamed to give away.

Thankfully I still had some ginger cookie dough in the freezer from lord knows when and I rolled that out and cut it in only semi-pathetic looking stars. They baked up just fine, and I am going to spend my holiday break trying to master the macaroon.