Christmas Cookies

Here it is, the last day of the month and my roommate and I realized that we forgot to visit two special friends. To make up for it, WE MADE COOKIES! They're just regular sugar cookies with delicious icing on top. This time we made the icing green and put red sugar sprinkles on top. If you guys could see you would want to eat way more than is good for you too.

Things you'll need:

Cookies
1 cup butter, softened
1 1/2 cups white sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
2 1/2-3 cups of flour

Icing
2 cups powdered Sugar
2 1/2 Tbsp heavy whipping cream
4 Tbsp butter
1 tsp vanilla extract

What you do:

Cookies
Preheat the oven to 375.
Cream together softened butter and sugar. Then add the eggs and vanilla. Then the baking powder and soda. Then add the flour a little bit at a time until you have a cookie dough texture.
Roll clumps around in your fingers (whatever size you want) and make them cookie shaped.
Place on greased cookie sheets and bake for 8-ish minutes.
This makes a lot of cookies, but the exact number will depend on how big they are.

Icing
But the cream and the butter into a saucepan and melt together over medium heat.
Once the butter is melted, drink it. No, don't. Just kidding. Once the butter is all melted add the vanilla and powdered sugar.
Remove from heat and mixer (see my verbicization) it until it thickens and there are no gross powdered sugar clumps left.

Now the fun part!
I found that spoons were the best mechanism for icing the cookies. I have been told that this icing can be piped from a ziploc bag and that it will harden on the cookies in nice pretty shapes fairly quickly...something to try next time.

Ice Cream

I discovered this one while looking for recipes for my dinner group and I loved it because it takes almost no time. (I also found a really good Chinese Chicken Recipe, but that's a little longer, so it can wait.) Now, for this delicious fruity ice cream.

You need:
about 10 oz. of frozen fruit (A mix of strawberries and mangoes is really good.)
2/3 cup heavy whipping cream
1/2 cup sugar

You need to:
Blend these all together. I don't quite have the process down, but I'd say start by blending just the fruit, so it's basically destroyed and in little tiny slurp-able pieces. Then add the whipping cream and sugar. Blend blend blend so that it is all blend-y. You can eat it right away, but it will be more of a smoothie texture at that point. (Frankly, sometimes I can't resist.) Another option (the one that will make it more like ice cream) is to freeze it for a while. I don't actually know how long. Until it is at the consistency you want. Consume.

Now that wasn't so hard, was it?