Holiday Cooking

Almost everyone knows that the holidays brings the joys of food. Not just any kind of food. The fattening kind. I made chicken and dressing last weekend just because I was craving dressing. I finally got the birthday cake out of my refrigerator and thought it was the perfect time to make cookies. The cookies that I have been putting off because I had two birthday cakes in my fridge and there was three bowls of halloween candy in my room. Cookies that I bought the ingredients for at the beginning of last month and have been itching to bake. Those cookies. Also known as peanut blossoms.

Now I had never had peanut blossoms until I had some Hershey Kisses one year and found the recipe on the back. I decided they sounded good and had to try them. I've been hooked ever since. They are best when eaten about five minutes after they come out of the oven. That gives the cookie time to cool off but the chocolate is soft and gooey. But the recipe amuses me. The first thing it tells you to do is unwrap 48 kisses. First of all, every person is going to make the cookies at a different size, simply because there is room for error there. No one is going to see 1" balls the same way I do. And because of that I only had 41 cookies. So what would I have done with the other 7 kisses? Eat them because they were open? Feed them to the kids? I mean all of us would be eating the cookies so we really didn't need to add to the junk by downing extra kisses. Throw them away? That would be a waste of perfectly good chocolate, a huge no-no in this household.

Second, why unwrap the kisses before you do anything else? You have 8-10 minutes of wait time before you need the kisses while the cookies bake in the oven. Do they expect you to stand there and watch the cookies swell up through the door of the oven while they bake? Well I hate to break it to the recipe department at Hershey's, but my oven doesn't have a viewing window so I have other things to do. That's when I open the first round of kisses. Sixteen of them to be exact, the same amount of cookies that are baking in the oven. By the time the last of my cookies came out of the oven, I had most of the cookie dishes washed, the last of the kisses unwrapped, and the supper dishes washed that I had yet to work on. Guess I didn't have to unwrap those kisses first after all. But they were still good.