Well it’s only taken until the LAST MONTH of the year to finally post on here. It’s time for the 2025 holiday cookie box!
I’m going to be honest, I haven’t done much baking this year and when I have, it’s been recipes I know and love, not new ones I’ve created. Last November I had a spinal cord stimulator placed to help manage the pain in my knee caused by CRPS (complex regional pain syndrome). While my knee has quite literally never felt better, I found out in April that I have a bilateral pars defect in my spine (basically a broken back) as well as spondylolisthesis which means where my fracture is, the top vertebra is sliding over the bottom vertebra. My initial x-rays showed a 4-5mm slippage, and my most recent x-rays show a 7-8mm slippage – that’s almost 1cm!
Needless to say, this has been yet another pain filled year so I’ve been trying to focus on taking it easy to not keep flaring my back pain. Fortunately, or I guess really unfortunately, over the last 10 years I’ve developed a few strategies for managing/coping with my chronic pain and I have the most incredible support system around me. I wish I could be pain free, but that’s apparently not what life has in store for me.
But moving on to year 5 of the holiday cookie box!
I always have so much fun baking all of the cookies and putting these together. It might have taken me more time than past years to put it together, but I couldn’t imagine skipping a year. This is one of my favourite holiday traditions!
To keep things simple, I made the cookies I know and love, cookies that have been in most of my cookie boxes over the last few years. I knew I wasn’t going to include macarons this year because those are more back intensive, so I added some colour to the box with sugar cookies dipped in colourful royal icing. I’m a big fan of dipping my cookies in royal icing because it’s easier and each cookie looks different, which I love.
We’ve also got brown butter chocolate chip cookies studded with red and green m&ms and crinkle cookies topped with a peppermint kiss. That’s about as colourful as this box gets! But what it might lack in colour, it makes up for in flavour. We’ve got peppermint, ginger, chocolate, vanilla, and orange flavours throughout this box. My personal favourite cookie in here is the ginger cookie – call me grandma, but I live for a good ginger cookie and these never fail.
Here are all of the cookies featured in this year’s cookie box!
- White chocolate peppermint cookies
- Ginger cookies
- Brown butter chocolate chip m&m cookies (with mini red & green m&ms!)
- Vanilla bean snickerdoodles
- Dark chocolate orange biscotti
- Crinkle cookies (rolled in granulated sugar and topped with a peppermint kiss)
- Sugar cookies (I thinned the frosting out with a little water for dipping instead of piping)
