Oh Christmas Tree, con't

    

The tree (note all the popcorn and dried cranberry strands in addition to the cookies.)

Here are the promised photos of our Christmas tree and its cookie ornaments!

The gingerbread cookies are some of my favorite gingerbread cookies to eat.  I found the recipe on the food network website by searching "gingerbread cookie ornaments," so I wasn't expecting them to taste great, but they really do!  They were pretty easy to make, but I found that the dough was very finicky and worked best the next day (even though the recipe only said that the dough needed to be chilled for a few hours.)  I found the cookie cutters I used at a Williams-Sonoma outlet.  It's a set of three nesting snowflake shaped cookie cutters (in small, medium and large) and two accent cookie cutters (very small diamond and chevron, to cut out details from the snow flakes.)  They were so much fun to play with because you can make a ton of different, pretty patterns.  

I left some of the gingerbread cookies plain and iced some with royal icing that I sprinkled with sugar while it was still wet.  I found the icing difficult to use, so I ended up doing mainly patterns with dots (which are easy enough).  Honestly, they looked great that way!

Gingerbread ornaments awaiting their icing.

Iced gingerbread cookies.  Aren't they pretty?!

The sugar cookies with "stained glass" windows were made using special cookie cutters (also from Williams-Sonoma, but not the outlet.)  I made the cookies using the recipe that came with the cookie cutters.  The dough (and subsequent cookies) was delicious and actually had cream cheese in it.  I've never seen a sugar cookie recipe that calls for cream cheese and I don't know why--they were amazing!  

The trick is that the cookie cutters, which are shaped like ornaments (with a hole for hanging them and everything) cut out decorative holes that you fill with crushed hard candy.  When they bake, the candy melts and forms a colored sugar window.  They are incredibly tedious to make because you have to be so careful filling the holes just enough, without getting any candy on the cookie, or it will get stained too.  They're worth the effort though, I think.  I mean, they look beautiful on the tree!

A close up of the one of the sugar cookies with "stained glass" windows.