i kinda love snow days. it reminds me of when i was in elementary school and we had tons and tons of off time. the house was always warm with baking things (mostly bread or cakes, as my parents were caterers at the time) and you could wake up to warmth. it was especially nice cause i didn't have heat in my room.

the one thing my mom was never any good at was baking cookies. brownies, cakes, breads-- hands down, best baker in the world. but cookies took a little too much patience. so i grew up making up cookies. couldn't get them to stay round for the life of me (finally got it today).

so i had both yesterday and today off of school and work (i've got tomorrow off too, so there'll be something like cake and stuff tomorrow) due to wintery weather. yay! in the basket above, you see my endeavors: shortbread, gingersnaps, snickerdoodles, molasses and toffee-white chocolate chip cookies. i had recipes to try! they all turned out pretty well, considering it was my first effort at all but the toffee, and the toffee suffered from a lack of ingredients.

the recipes aren't mine, but they're all WONDERFUL.

( Toffee Chocolate Chip Cookies )


( Shortbread )


( Molasses Cookies )


( Snickerdoodles )


( Gingersnaps )

when all was said and done, they were pretty good cookies. my gingersnaps weren't as gingery as we usually like, nor were they as 'snappy', but i like a softer cookie anyway. my toffee cookies would've been better had i had enough toffee on hand, or used far less white chocolate chips, as i just dumped the rest of the bag in and didn't measure(!).

as a note, i should probably say that my shortening tends to range from all butter crisco, to all butter, to a varied mix of butter and regular crisco. and, since i don't have parchment paper, i used greased wax paper. all in all, it worked pretty well.

it works for my brother, anyway. he's got a cookie monster theme on his sidekick that he's been playing every chance he gets.