making lately: sweet treats

Whenever there is a request for baked goods for church or school or the like, I always sign up - there are some types of tasks that I don't so much enjoy volunteering for, but making cookies? Spiritual gift there. The holiday season always provides ample opportunities for signing up, with church open houses and class parties, etc. But in this year's spirit of streamlining and simplifying the holidays a bit, I decided to branch out from my usual hand-decorated cutout cookies and pull out some other recipes:

Since I had several dozen cookies to bake, I did 3 different recipes for a fun taste variety. Totally different flavors from my usual iced sugar cookies, but all delicious in their own way, and all a bit quicker to produce!

The chocolate candy cane cookies and the spiced oatmeal cookies with brown butter icing are super quick to decorate, because there's no need to carefully spread frosting and sprinkles on each one - instead, I just lined them up on some parchment paper and "artfully" drizzled the icing/frosting overtop of all of them at once.

And then the chocolate chip cookie brittle is super quick by baking all on one tray - no need to separately drop dough balls onto the tray and then wait around while several trays bake - just spread it all onto one baking sheet and cut it up into squares after it cools!

If you've got any cookie baking left to do this season, I can heartily recommend all of these recipes...since I of course had to taste test one of each before giving them away. Ha!