Tis the season for baking!

My kitchen is officially cleaned up and "closed" for Christmas baking this year! Whew! There has been more butter, sugar and flour in the last week than probably the last few months of my baking combined! But all the hours in the kitchen, rotating cookies in and out of the oven, icing cupcakes and doing the dirty work of washing dishes has been completely worth it! This is my absolute favorite time of the year to bake and I have enjoyed sharing my sweets with neighbors and friends and hosting holiday parties!

We are packing up and starting our 11 hour trip to KY tomorrow to visit my family for Christmas and I have promised Randolph that this year there will be absolutely positively NO BAKING while we are there! So lucky for you, I had a marathon week of baking last week that I have enough photos and recipes to share with you through the end of December!

Last week I made all the desserts for a launch party for my friend Stephanie's new catering business! Stephanie recently started Bella's Bistro to pursue her love of cooking. Her focus is on Italian cuisine and let me just say her lasagna is Amazing! She recently won first place in the Mama Mia cook off in Daphne, AL for her Eggplant Caponata. I tasted this last week at her premier event and it was delicious! So if you live in Mobile, Daphne or any neighboring cities in Alabama keep Bella's Bistro in mind for your holiday parties, weddings, baby showers, etc. You are going to love what her menu has to offer!

Since Stephanie's love is for cooking and not baking, she asked me if I would be interested in making the desserts! Of course my response was YES! She gave me complete freedom to do whatever desserts I wanted, the only thing was I needed to have enough to feed around 200 people! WOW 200 people, I don't think I have ever baked for that large of a crowd before! So I tied on my apron and rolled dough, cut out and iced sugar cookies like it was my full time job.

In addition to cookies, I made cupcakes (from this post) and cake pops and cranked out enough desserts for an army! Let's just say I went a little overboard and had lots of leftovers. Lucky for me I have neighbors who are always willing to take sweets off my hands!

So here's a look at all the desserts I made for the party. Check back the rest of the week as I will post recipes for everything! I'll let the pictures speak for themselves right now!

I'm not sure if I made enough cookies...what do you think???