as a total cultural mutt who grew up celebrating both christmas and hanukkah, you know what i am enjoying right now? focusing my energy on christmas. i mean, i love hanukkah. i love latkes, and donuts, and candles... but i also love that it was combined with thanksgiving this year and not christmas.

when you celebrate christmas and hanukkah, you always find yourself spending the extra syllable to say happy chrismukkah, you look for hanukkah ornaments for your chrismukkah bush, you add the adam sandler hanukkah song onto holiday playlists because you'll feel bad if it's just christmas tunes, you spend five minutes at the town tree lighting ceremony finding the itsy bitsy menorah.... oh, and you have to save room for latkes and this can sometimes mean eating less cookies.

no.

yes.

eating less cookies in the name of latkes. it's just what needs to be done sometimes.

and that may be the number one reason why i am enjoying this quality alone time with christmas.

i took part in a christmas cookie swap. a giant massive international one! it was so cool. i typically don't do this type of thing, but since moving here, i have been loving sending out cute little packages of goodies to my friends in other states. and you should see how adorable the town post office is. it's in a little brick and white house that closes for a lunch hour, there's never a line, and bruce is the name of the sweet man that is always behind the counter. mailing things is my new favorite.

my cookie for the swap was inspired by peppermint joe-joe's. i love those little guys. i made my take on them, and knowing that they would have to be sturdy enough for a few days in the mail, i made the centers out of marshmallow.

the result was a chewy, chocolatey, peppermint delight!

peppermint marshmallow sandwich cookies

1. make one batch of smitten kitchen's brownie roll-out cookies (tip: instead of dusting your work surface with flour, dust it with cocoa powder so the chocolatey color doesn't fade.)

2. make one batch of this marshmallow recipe, but replace the vanilla extract with peppermint extract, and then omit the colored sanding sugar and cocoa/chocolate chips. basically you only need to follow steps 3-8.

3. pipe a dollop of marshmallow cream onto the centers of half of your cookies, and then top them with another cookie. let set for a few hours and then enjoy!

-yeh!