Christmas Cookie Blitz

I had big plans for my holiday baking this year. Last year I gave away red and white themed baking boxes that were pretty cute:

Unfortunately, I spent the weekend I had planned to do all that baking re-enacting some scenes from The Exorcist, so I had to smoosh 3 days of colour-coordination, detail-oriented work into a 5 hour post-work baking blitz this week.  All things considered, I was pretty happy:

 

Santa Hat Meringues, inspired by (though not quite as successful as) Haniela's:

  

Old Fashioned Press Cookies:

 

 

 And I'm not sure what to call these....Red Velvet Hugs?  I picked up some minty white kisses with Christmas sprinkles on the bottom, and knew I wanted to make a version of the peanut butter blossom cookies, but with the kiss flipped over so showcase the sprinkles.  I figured red velvet would make a good base, so I used this recipe from Cooking Light, and added the inverted kisses to the hot cookies as soon as they came out of the oven so that they would melt right into the cookies.

  

And lastly, some melted snowmen cookies.  I made some of these a few years ago, after seeing the idea online.  I can't remember where I first saw the idea, but I do know that Meaghan from The Decorated Cookie is responsible for the original genius idea. I decided to use big marshmallows for the heads, because I thought that would be easier.  These cookies were also made in the days before I really knew how to use royal icing, so they were awkwardly covered in some buttercream:

  

What I remember most about those cookies were what a pain making the actual base was.  Freehand cutting out the cookies was annoying.  So, last year when I found this cookie cutter at Ikea (!) I knew that it was born to be a melting snowman (made even easier by using this roll-out sugar cookie recipe from Culinary Concoctions):

 Then I saw a variation of the cookie in a holiday cookie magazine, that used reese cups for the hat and made the whole cookie the snowman's melted head.  When I saw the Reese bell-shaped cups for the holidays, they seemed destined to be snowmen's hats.  Some royal icing for the snow, a few mini chocolate chips for the eyes, and an orange candy-covered nose, and these were super easy to assemble at 1 am, when all best holiday tasks are accomplished.....