We started the New Year with something sweet once again. It was wonderful, the perfect end to the holidays this year. It's hard to remember that I'd considered not having another party last year, after we invited so many people and so few showed up. Then several people asked to make sure we were going to have our party this year, so I got excited about it again. It was the right choice for me. I hope everyone else had fun.

As in all things, enjoying my own party seems to be about paring down. Instead of six types of cookies, we baked four this year. I remembered to pack some of the leftovers up for most people to take home. Mason has a tin ready to go to work with him. We're not swallowed by drifts of cookies this year.

Mason's chocolate chips were yummy, as ever. He used the Guittard chocolate chips, which are big chunks of chocolate, so the distribution was a little uneven. Good chocolate is the way to go, though.

My lemon cookies were a delicious disaster. I liked the recipe because it called for a whole lemon thrown into the food processor. Unfortunately, my little machine did a terrible job of mixing the butter and sugar and everything liquid. I would've done better with the hand mixer. I substituted plain yogurt for sour cream and one stick or margarine for one stick of butter, but I'm not sure if that was the problem. The cookies flattened out into big fragile pallid amoebas. They tasted good, but they were in no sense cookie-like. That recipe goes into the trash.

Same for the Chocolate Peppermint cookies. Wow, did the dough smell wonderful: 1/2 cup of melted Lindt chocolate bar, 45 crushed peppermint hard candies, Ghiradelli cocoa, vanilla, mint extract... Important safety tip: peppermint candy melts to napalm. You have approximately .038 of a second to get the cookie off the baking sheet between the time where its hot and melty and when the napalm hardens. The cookies looked awful: unappetizing eldritch tendrils of pocked brown dough clutching brightly striped pieces of candy. Mason didn't stack them on the plate with waxed paper between, so they were pretty much a sticky brown heap come party time. I should have just cut them into squares and called it good.

We substituted the fourth recipe at the last minute. I was going to make my Grandma Rhoads's Soft Malasses (sic) Cookies, but the recipe is ... um, kinda vague. It asks you to "add enough flour to roll out well," then warns "This recipe makes about half bushel of cookies." My annotation says that's 8 dozen. After the two disasters, including the second one where I followed the recipe exactly, we decided to go with Jeff's Molasses Cookies, which turned out to be the hit of the party. Even if they also were flat, rather than doughy.

I suspect the oven is our problem. I'm still getting used to the Jenn-Air. I think I've mastered how it cooks poultry, but there's clearly some kind of adjustment necessary to get it from overcooking cookies. They come out of the oven high and round and lovely, then flatten out to pancakes. Hm. I suppose this means we'll have to have another cookie party next year, if people have the patience to allow me to work out the kinks in the system.

I'm going to need to contrive more opportunities to bake cookies, too. More practice is clearly required.