Cookie & Candy Exchange

Tomorrow night is the annual Cookie & Candy Exchange for the women from my Sunday School class at church.  Many of us aren't regular attenders of the class anymore as it was a Young Marrieds class that's been going for some time and has evolved over time, as our schedules have evolved over time.  But we still get together for this and other events, and some of us ladies meet twice a month for prayer time.

This is such a nice highlight of the Christmas season.  Each of us makes half a dozen cookies or candies for each of the other women attending.  We bring them along with a non-sweet dish to share at the exchange, where we sit and eat and talk and just have a nice relaxing time in the midst of a busy season.  At the end, we leave with 9 or 10 (sometimes more) different types of holiday sweets to enjoy over the next few weeks, having only had to make a few batches of one kind ourselves!  Brilliant.  I love whoever came up with the idea of exchanges in the first place.  And that reminds me that I haven't blogged about Make Ahead Meals yet.  Next post!

This year for the Cookie & Candy Exchange, I'm making Praline Cookies with Brown Sugar Frosting.  I'll bet you wish you had the recipe for that, huh?  Here you go!  Praline Cookies and Brown Sugar Frosting.  I'm pretty much making the cookies as is, except I added more maple flavoring for a stronger maple taste.  Also, last year when I made some of these for the holidays, I used a whole pecan half on the top, but I found myself eating the cookies in a way to try to get a bite of pecan with the cookie.  This year, I'm coarsely chopping the pecans and sprinkling them across the top so that there's pecan in every bite.

I definitely recommend making them with the Brown Sugar Frosting drizzled over the top.  If you prefer your cookies on the less sweet side, you may want to skip the frosting.  Me?  They're cookies!  I like them sweet, and the frosting adds the perfect finishing touch.  The recipe says to cook the frosting in an iron skillet.  I just used a regular nonstick saucepan, and it worked fine.  I added about half a teaspoon of maple flavoring to the frosting.

This year's frosting ended up with a little different taste and darker color.  I think I must have used light brown sugar last year, and this year I went with the recipe's dark brown sugar.  I actually liked last year's better, so I'll be using light brown sugar when I make these again in the future.  I boiled it for a minute or two on the stove, then waited for it to thicken a little before starting to drizzle.  Apparently I waited a little too long, because it was solidifying while I still had a lot of cookies left to cover!  I had to work quickly, so it's a bit globby on some.  But I can't complain - these taste pretty good!