Sunday 12-16-07 XMas Cookies

We started the day with a nice French Toast breakfast that soon morphed into a cookie baking marathon. We made numerous dozens of sugar cookie cutouts (which Terri decorated on Monday) peanut butter kiss cookies and finally some double chocolate chip monsters.
The junk food construction took all day so naturally we needed libations that could get us through all the mixing, measuring, cutting, squeezing, dolloping, cleaning, baking and arranging.
At about 11am we started off with a bottle of Affligem Tripel that I had somehow avoided consuming the previous two weeks as it sat in my winter cooler garage. The Tripel, despite it's big beer reputation, seemed appropriate considering The Chiefs football day was rapidly heading down the tubes in yet another home defeat. Besides the Belgian's 8.5% abv promised to keep us warm on the chilly December morning. Terri insisted on a red after the "Belgian Burgundy" so we headed in that direction with a couple of North Coast Red Seals. After the Seals we naturally gravitated to the hop realm where we sample a couple of new brews that I'd just picked up. One was Mt Shasta Brewing's "Mountain High" IPA from Weed CA and the other was Butte Creek Brewing's Organic India Pale Ale. Both IPA's were excellent examples of what I might term early session IPA's. Pleasant hoppy nose, especially in the Shasta, nice medium body with just enough malt to carry the hops through to a pleasing finish. The Butte Creak also offered a nice hint of caramel going down.
Naturally as the day wore on the cookies were flowing from dollops to cooling board and the IPA's were flowing as well. Racer 5, Green Flash Imperial and a couple of 2007 Sierra Nevada Big Foots rounded out the day. Hopefully everyone will enjoy the cookie plates as much as we did making them. Well...I guess that's not really possible.