Each holiday has its appropriate time period. I get that. Halloween gets October, Thanksgiving gets November, and starting on Black Friday, it’s Christmas everywhere.

But I’m one of the many committing the overly-excited holiday faux pas. Starting with this.

Hey, when you live alone in San Francisco in an apartment the size of a closet and are single, you do what you need to do to make home feel homier. So, I am owning the fact that I have the tree up already. Suck it, haters! : )

And spent the whole day listening to the Spotify Ultimate Holiday Playlist. Note to anyone considering this: I highly recommend listening to Dominick the Donkey by Lou Monte. It will ruin holiday music for you forever.

After my glorious and VERY much needed Lazy Sunday, I had a big choice to make:

Special shout-out to Angela for suggesting that baking = cross training. YES!

I decided on the perfect compromise: I’d go on a four-mile run that conveniently ended at the supermarket, where I could buy ingredients for cookies. Win-win!

I took my new shoes (Mizuno Wave Inspire 8s) out for their first spin today. My Brooks Adrenalines breathed their last breath during my 16-mile run yesterday so I knew I needed something fast. I was praying that these worked out. And it was just four miles, but they did just fine!

8:35/8:05/7:46/7:38 miles! Yes, they were downhill, but still, I rarely see anything in the 7s so I’m pleased.

Then I ended up at the grocery store for cookie ingredients! I recently received coupons from Duncan Hines via the Foodbuzz Tastemaker program, so I figured I’d come up with my own holiday-ish recipe using their products as a base. I checked online and tried to adapt the Red Velvet Crinkle Cookies recipe slightly to fit my tastes.

The ingredients:

• 1 box Red Velvet cake mix
• 2 eggs
• 6T butter, melted and cooled
• 1t almond extract
• 1C white chocolate chips
• 1C powdered sugar
• 1t cornstarch

Note to everyone: baking at my apartment is terrifying. My gas stove tends to smoke for the first ten minutes and the internal temperature is usually about 100 degrees hotter than what the dial is set to. Thank God I have an internal thermometer. But that’s why I’ve started fires…

Mixed the butter/eggs/almond extract together and then added to the cake mix box and blended. Once that was more or less smooth, I added a bajillion white chocolate chips.

Then, rolled the dough into balls and rolled them in a dish of the powdered sugar mixed with the cornstarch.

And you don’t actually need to grease the pan, don’t mind me not reading instructions for the first batch…

Put them in the oven for what was supposedly in the neighborhood of 350 for about 12 minutes and viola!

Mine didn’t have as cool of a cracked look—most of the powdered sugar seemed to disappear (sad). But numerous taste tests meant these cookies had my approval, I don’t like dry cookies, and these definitely aren’t—moist and flavorful. Yum.

I also picked up a can of DH cream cheese frosting and whipped it up with a bunch of powdered sugar to give it a more solid consistency and frosted those puppies up.

Deeeeelicious and was the perfect “milk and cookies in front of the tree” thing.

GIVEAWAY!

I want to sweeten up your life so I’m going to send two readers three coupons each for DH products of your choosing—that’s a cake mix, a can of frosting AND an extra brownie mix or something once the cake is gone

To enter, just leave a comment on this post and tell me what your favorite holiday dessert is. I’ll pick two winners on Sunday.

Have a great week everyone!

Courtney

What’s your favorite holiday dessert?

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