I am extremely fortunate to have a group of eight of us who have known each other at least since high school. (Carol and I just celebrated our 60th year of friendship; we’ve known each other since kindergarten!) We call ourselves the HaHa’s because we laugh so much when we’re together. This weekend, we had our annual holiday cookie exchange. The event has evolved over the years — we now bring frozen dough so we can each bake what we want when we want. In addition to our dough exchange and lots of laughter, we might have stuffed ourselves with good food and wine. I’m not confessing to anything!

My cookies were extremely easy to do, and I was able to fairly quickly make eight batches for sharing. The recipe comes from the Magnolia Days blog, and I followed the recipe almost to a tee. (Find the recipe here:  https://magnoliadays.com/lemon-sour-cream-cookies.) The directions called for grating a lemon and rubbing the zest into the sugar with your fingers. What a brilliant technique! The lemon fragrance spread through the kitchen and flavored the sugar perfectly. The recipe is straightforward and the blog post is well-explained, so I won’t give any more comment on it.

But I did do a quick craft project to decorate the slice-and-bake logs and to give written directions for baking. Using a large purchased tag, I sprayed each side with red watercolor spray. I printed the baking directions on one side…

… and used scrapbook paper, a fine-tipped Sharpie pen, and ModPodge to decorate the other side.

CRAP ALERT: I glued the trees too far up onto the tags, and they weren’t centered to my liking. Pieces of green washi tape fixed the problem in a hurry.

To finish the packages, I used red and white bakers twine to tie the tag onto each log. Quick, cute, and fun!