christmas baking

This weekend was full of a lot of friends, a lot of eating/drinking and a lot cookies...and, in my case, cupcakes. I like sweets. No, I love sweets. But I do tend to crave savory over sweet, and this weekend was sweets overload. The thought of eating another cookie makes me a little sick (at least for today, we'll see how I feel tomorrow).

Friday was our annual cookie bake/Christmas Vacation movie night at Tina and Michael's. The tradition started with Eric, TIna and our friend Mike who were college classmates and used to get together and watch Christmas Vacation every Christmas - sometimes 3x in one night. And sometimes with the volume muted so they could try to recite all the lines. I think there was a lot of Jagermeister involved. Ours only involves one viewing of Christmas Vacation and no Jager, but still a lot of fun. We baked a ton of cookies:



My contribution were roasted chestnut cookies - I found the recipe on Smitten Kitchen. They were good, but not amazing - which is surprising because every recipe I've tried from Smitten Kitchen has been awesome:





On Sunday was Karen's annual cookie exchange and instead of cookies I made Ina Garten's coconut cupcakes. I made them a couple years ago and absolutely loved them, so I decided to make them again. I follow the recipe pretty closely except that instead of using almond extract, I use lemon extract - although I don't put lemon extract (or almond) in the frosting. They're so yummy and so pretty too!