Merry Christmas, you fat bastard.

350 degrees for 12-15 minutes. Mom's recipe needs more ginger and cinnamon, at least a teaspoon and a half or two of each.

My stalwart dry ingredient mixer is a big Austin Powers fan; as she took these guys out of the oven she noted that they look like Fat Bastard. Too bad I didn't have plaid frosting.

We made too many cookies yesterday, including Pecan shortbread and spicy chocolate cookies from our friend Martha Stewart; peanut butter brownies, oatmeal raisin, sugar cookies filled with fig-orange preserves and hermits from Fannie Farmer; and Nanaimo bars from some prissy museum cookbook. The batch of Nanaimos tastes much better than it looks, and requires practice or perhaps another recipe with firm custard.

Technical notes: I watched Alton Brown and Santa make cookies the other night, and followed Alton's advice about rotating the cookies halfway through baking, as well as switching the sheets from top to bottom oven rack. I used parchment paper to keep the sheets clean since I had umpteen batches to bake. I noticed that the shiny sheets made for a better cookie, and didn't burn the bottoms the way the dark teflon coated sheets did, so I'm getting some more of those. Even when I put a Silicone mat down over the dark sheets, the bottoms still got too brown. Shiny is good. I baked the brownies and the hermits in Pyrex pans, which work ok. I didn't have any cream of tartar for the hermits so I replaced it and the baking soda with baking powder.