Santa's Favorite Christmas Cookies for Know-It-Alls And Their Families

Dear Reader,

This recipe comes at the request of Erin, who is visiting her family in Ohio.

Enjoy!

Santa's Favorite Christmas Cookies for Know-It-Alls And Their Families

You probably already know you will need:

4 1/2 cups of flour

3/4 cup sugar

3 eggs

2 tsp. vanilla

1 stick butter

1/4 tsp. each cream of tartar, baking soda and salt

1/2 tsp. baking powder

1/2 cup milk (as needed)

Chocolate filling:

16 oz. milk chocolate

16 oz. semi-sweet chocolate

large can evaporated milk

1 tsp. vanilla

In a large bowl, cream butter and sugar.  Sugar comes from the sugar cane and your body changes it into glucose.  Certain varieties of chicken can produce up to 300 eggs per year, but we only need three.  Beat them into the butter and sugar.  Add vanilla, which was originally harvested by the ancient Totonaco Indians of Mexico, but now either comes from Madagascar, Indonesia, Tahiti or Mexico.  If you have been to these places, provide family with points of local interest or aspects of their culture.  In a separate bowl mix together  dry ingredients including Potassium bitartrate, more commonly known as cream of tartar, which is a byproduct of winemaking.  Mix dry ingredients into wet.  Add as much milk as necessary to roll into a dough, divide in two and wrap in plastic wrap.  Put it in the refrigerator.

In the top of a double boiler mix the ingredients for the chocolate filling.  Chocolate, which comes from the Cacao tree, was disovered over 2,000 years ago in the tropical rainforests of the southern Americas.  But everybody knows that.  The chocolate chip was actually invented by Ruth Wakefield who ran the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts.  Massachusetts became a state on February 6th, 1788.  Steve Smith, the drummer from the band Journey, is also from Whitman, Massachusetts.

Roll the dough out to the size of a baking sheet.  Pour on the chocolate and then roll out the second piece of dough, to make the top layer - like a pie crust - and put that over the chocolate.  Brush with an egg wash - another interesting fact about eggs is that a chicken egg has about 17,000 tiny pores on its surface.  Also when you boil a duck egg, the whites turn a bluish color and the yolks reddish-orange, which is really gross.  Emu eggs range from medium green to very dark green and weigh 3/4 pound.  They are mostly yolk, and very mild in flavor.  Place in a preheated oven set to 350.  Cook for about 20-25 minutes.  Wonder where the heck everybody went.