15 Recipes for Your Enormous Christmas Cookie Tray!!!

They say that admitting you have a problem is the first step to overcoming it. But what happens when you have no intention of changing, even after admitting that you have a problem? Sure I have a problem, but I rather like my particular brand of lunacy. It results in things like what we’re going to discuss today and I think we can all agree that what comes from this dark place is something no one is going to object to. (TO WHICH NO ONE WILL OBJECT, FINE.)

So here goes with the admission, and oooooooh man, even by my standards this is bad: for a few years now I’ve wanted to try my hand at making a big ol’ honkin’ Christmas Cookie Tray. You know the sort — like the ones you see all wrapped up in cellophane in the kind of Italian bakeries that sell rum baba and pink leaves? Oh the unholy things I’ve done to a rum baba in my day….

The thing is, I know I can do it — I know I can, daily affirmation, I can do this thing, I have untapped reserves of inner strength — because, in news that will shock exactly none of you, I come from a long line of Italian bakers. My mother’s people came to this country and opened a bakery in New Haven. Her grandfather even made her wedding cake. But — until now — the notion of putting together an entire cookie tray — we’re talking a dozen+ types of cookies that need to be coordinated so that the tray has something for everyone and offers an aesthetically pleasing array of colors and shapes and sizes and CUE FREAK OUT — was terribly overwhelming to me. Until now.

You might have had this fear as well. And you might have similar challenges: my kitchen is the size of a postage stamp; I’m not exactly the least busy gal on the planet; and this kind of thing takes time and space but mostly it takes organization.

But! Organization is one area in which I truly shine. (Friends have recoiled in shock when I’ve opened my refrigerator to reveal the perfectly arranged items inside. I never miss a meeting or forget an engagement. My junk drawer is tidy. This is my handbag.)

Perhaps you are not so organized. So I did for you what any dementedly organized baker would do and I made a spreadsheet detailing exactly what I would put on the perfect cookie tray, and all the attendant details that go along. And it’s… I just… I think I’m going to let it speak for itself, okay.

Or view and even print from right here!

If you need me, I’ll be sitting in the corner rocking myself back and forth. In a perfectly linear manner.

Jolie Kerr wants to know about your favorite holiday cookie recipes. Tell us in the comments!

Photo by “Samdogs.”