There are very few activities that you can do that are as good as making cookies. Maybe playing a favorite sport or listening to your favorite CD or maybe even sex. But there's just something special about making homemade cookies.

Today is Homemade Cookies Day, which means if you go to the store and buy anything in a package the food police will come to your home and slap the handcuffs on you.

This is where I usually link to various recipes, but have you seen how many cookie recipes there are on the web? 94 trillion (I counted). So I'll link to a bunch of collections at various sites, such as AllRecipes, Food Network, Joy of Baking, and Kraft Foods.

This page dedicated to National Sugar Cookie Day starts by saying that today is "a day to satisfy your sweet tooth." Hey, sounds like every Monday to me!

But let's make some sugar cookies today. I think that sugar cookies are sometimes taken for granted, because people see them as "plain" or "basic." But there's something so simple and nice about the taste of a sugar cookie. Even the name tells you what you're going to get. Everyone who cooks should know how to bake a good one.

Here's a recipe for sugar cookies, and here's one for Cotton Candy Sugar Cookies. AllRecipes has one for Cookie Jar Sugar Cookies.

There's only one thing that people love better than eating food, and that's eating food in wacky shapes! That's why food shaped like Christmas trees and bunnies and cartoon characters are so popular. I think if we were given the choice between regular shaped snacks and snacks shaped like Fred Flintstone or something pornographic, we'd choose the fun shaped ones.

Here's a pistol-shapped cookie cutter. I bet this would cause havoc if people had it on their carry-on at the airport. Can you imagine trying to explain this to authorities?

"It's for cookies, I swear! Cooooooookieeeeeeees!"

[via Boing Boing]

The expression that "it's hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk" is a common one, but have you ever heard of someone baking cookies in their car? A woman in New Hampshire did just that, taking advantage of the extremely high heat that her area had been experiencing. With outdoor temperatures in the mid to upper 90s, the temperature in her RAV4 reached about 200F. She placed trays of prepared dough on her dashboard and went inside to wait with her coworkers for the cookies to be done.

The chef, Sandi Fontaine, has actually been doing these car cookies for about 3 years now, whenever the temperature climbs about 95F. She notes that an additional benefit of in-car baking is that the fresh cookie smell lingers in the car for many days after a batch has been completed.

Update: View photo here.

There are many bakers who use a cookie scoop to ensure that their cookies come out to be the exact same size with each batch they bake. For a professional baker, the tool can be helpful because it guarantees that they will get the exact number of cookies that they need from a batch of dough. For a home baker, it simply means that baking times will be standardized and the finished cookies will all be evenly done.

But because some find the useful, it doesn't mean that scoops are necessary objects. I don't like using cookie scoops at home, despite the fact I have several different kinds. I don't find that they work well, even when I use warm water to rinse them between every few scoops, because dough will inevitably stick to them. I get results that are just as good - evenly portioned and evenly baked - when I simply "eyeball" the sizes of my cookie dough balls.

Scoops are a great idea for kids, though. They have a hard time measuring out the dough by eye and will end up with cookie dough in fewer places (hair, clothing, etc), if their hands aren't directly touching the dough. There is an added bonus of your child having their very own "special" tool in the kitchen, which will probably encourage them to come in and help out more often.

Happy St. Patrick's Day, Slashfood readers!

While we here at Slashfood did the majority of our St. Patrick's Day preparation yesterday, we don't want to forget that today is the actual day to wear a bit of green, indulge in a pint of Guinness, and have a couple of shamrock-shaped sugar cookies! These are simple cookies made from dough sugar cookie dough dyed with green food coloring - use more than a few drops or else they'll be a little pale, like mine were - and piped with white chocolate. Make sure to drink your Bailey's on the rocks after you finish the piping, too, otherwise the lines will be a little squiggly like mine.

So what's the story behind the shamrock anyway? "Shamrock" is derived from the Celtic word "seamroy" for a three-leafed clover. It is considered a sacred plant because it symbolizes the arrival of spring and the idea of re-birth. The shamrock has long been associated with Irish culture because it is believed that St.Patrick used the three-leafed clover to symbolize the Trinity.

The idea of the lucky four leaf clover comes from a legend that the three leave of a regular clover each symbolize hope, faith and love. A fourth leaf on a clover symbolizes luck.

I'll take all the luck I can get, so I made a cookie with four leaves for myself.

The article from Saveur seduced me with its tale of thousands of cookies baked around the clock in the small town of Solebury, Pennsylvania. Trinity Church, an Episcopal parish, raises about $1,700 each year through its 20,000-cookie bakefest. But better than the money was the idea... grandmothers and little boys and single parishioners all working together to mix, roll, bake and box the buttery cookies made from recipes handed down for generations.

How could I resist? So two years ago I tried this recipe when I bought a Costco bag of walnuts and needed to use them up. Ever since I've been buying walnuts, nutmeg and cinnamon specifically for this recipe. These cookies satisfy my longing for spicy, crispy, nutty treats - and they're protein packed and low-net carb, to boot. I eat them for breakfast throughout December.