Every year as the holiday season approaches, I read about cookie swaps.  In person, in the mail, cookie swaps all over the country!  This year I made sure I would be part of the fun and I signed up for The Great Food Blogger Cookie Swap.  For the last 5 years, Lindsay from Love and Olive Oil and Julie of The Little Kitchen have put this event together and all of the proceeds go to Cookies for Kids Cancer.

The process is simple, sign up, make a small donation and wait for your swap matches to arrive via email.  Then you bake cookies, 1 dozen for each of your three matches, ship them and wait for the cookies to arrive on your doorstep.

Choosing a cookie recipe was easy and I made a big batch of springerle using the special rolling pin Darry brought back from Germany.  Springerle are a traditional Christmas cookie from Germany, flavored with lemon and anise and rolled out with special pins or pressed into molds.

Some recipes call for sprinkling anise seeds on the tray rather than adding them to the dough.  Because I was curious, I added seeds to half the dough.  Once I began rolling the cookies out, I could see why it isn’t the best option; it makes it harder to get the details of the mold if seeds are near the surface of the dough.

Once the cookies are rolled and cut, they need to dry for at least 8 hours and up to 24 so that the details are preserved during baking.  The pin Darry brought back from Germany has 12 different molds on it.

Some day I hope to collect some of the traditional plaque molds, but until I do, I will use my vintage chocolate molds.  They actually made highly detailed cookies and I wish I had made more of them…

Since I was in full holiday mode, I experimented with painting some of the cookies.  If you decide to paint them, do so after the drying period and right before they go into the oven.

And because this was part of a cookie swap, lets get down to the details.  For each of my matches, I packed the cookies into metal tins with tissue paper.

Here are all three of the tins waiting to go out in the mail to my three matches.  The exciting part about this is that three people sent me cookies and I am enjoying them immensely!

 

From Monica of Pass the Cocoa, I received chocolate wafer sandwiches with a peanut butter filling.

From Stacy of What the Cupcake?  came a tub of flourless chocolate peppermint cookies.  Can you believe she tied each one in a little bag.

And lastly, from Laney of Life is but a Dish came some classic chocolate chip cookies.

All stacked up and ready for snacking…I may have to hide these from Darry.  What I really want to know is how the three of you knew to send me chocolate?

To make springerle, visit House on the Hill and bake a batch of their Perfection Springerle Cookies.  And if you are in the market for some molds or a pin, House on the Hill has beautiful molds and so do these sites; cookiemold.com  and fancyflours.com.