It's that time of year again -- time to report on this year's results of the WebWarren Cookie Laboratories.

Lest you think I've had a bit too much of the nonexistent "adult" eggnog (or given the outdoor temperatures, the nonexistent hot toddy), The Other Half's parents like to have several varieties of cookies on hand for Christmas Day visitors (i.e., the entire extended family) -- and with his mother no longer able to do the sort of baking she once did, we try to take up a bit of the slack. The first time we did cookie baking up here, I was trying to develop some new cookie recipes, and we brought down the results in a carton repurposed with Christmas wrapping paper and labeled "WEBWARREN COOKIE LABS -- EXPERIMENTAL SAMPLES". The name -- and the mock pretentiousness -- stuck. While were not able to get down south this year, the Cookie Labs have been in full force.

Usually, the only time I bake cookies is around Christmas. This year, however, I've made cookies on five separate occasions: Red Dress cookies in February, Pink Ribbon cookies and Halloween cookies in October, (gluten-free) World Diabetes Day cookies in November, and now Christmas cookies. Most of these have been some variation of sugar cookie: plain/vanilla, gingerbread, or chocolate, and iced within a millimeter of their lives. (Blame it on the Cake Boss and on one of my friends who keeps tweeting photos of her cookie work.)

Looking at the "real sugar" versus "made-with-Splenda" nutritional stats in the Winter 2009 issue of Diabetic Living, it quickly became obvious that both the calorie and carb counts vary so little between the two versions of any cookie (5-10 calories out of 100 total, 1-2 g carb out of 15-20 total) that it made more sense to just use sugar and be done with. Since I don't believe in using hydrogenated vegetable oils, I usually use real butter as well.. (I've had some good success with Brummel & Brown spread, a yogurt-and-oil-based margarine. I was not too happy with the taste of baked goods made with Spectrum Organic's solid shortening.) I do, however, draw the line at using white flour. Unless I'm trying my hand at gluten-free, I'm using whole wheat flour (preferably whole-wheat pastry flour, which is made from soft "white" wheat). I'm so incredibly not-up on gluten-free that I had to buy Bob's Red Mill pre-packaged gluten-free baking mix to do my World Diabetes Day cookies.

One trick I'm able to use for Christmas cookies specifically is that of using miniature cookie cutters. When the largest dimension of a cookie is less than half the size of the usual 4- and 5-inch cookie cutters, a recipe for three dozen cookies expands out to something closer to two hundred -- enough to share with a small army -- and the calories and carbs diminish proportionally. We end up with enough to share with friends and family, and they don't have issues with not wanting to break a highly-decorated cookie in small pieces just to try a single bite.

Besides the miniature vanilla, gingerbread, and chocolate sugar cookies, I got a chance to experiment with a couple of gluten-free cookie recipes in my Christmas baking. The  Cinnamon Stars I'd looked at in October turned out to be Zimtsterne -- traditional star-shaped macaroons made from ground almonds with baked-in meringue icing. I also changed up a peanut-butter cookie recipe by using Trader Joe's Peanut Flour instead of the wheat-based variety. It's a quick swap that not only intensifies the peanut taste and eliminates the recipe's only source of gluten, but at half the carbs and twice the protein of wheat flour, it's a bit more d-friendly as well.

I finally took the time to work with a Christmas cookie tree set I got some years ago (graduated star-shaped cookie cutters and a recipe for cookies that should stay intact through the decorating and stacking processes). The results are pretty, though I'm not sure how or why most people would consider eating it.

Links to a page with as many of my cookie recipes as can be found online, and some of my cookie cutters, can be found here.