Secret Santa

This is Secret Santa Week at work.  Last week, we all filled out surveys to help our Santa out - filled with ideas of our favorite treats, office supplies, magazines, fast food, scents, etc.  We could be as silly or as serious as we wanted when filling these out (one coworker wanted to answer everything with "wine"), and then we drew from the surveys to figure out who we were the Secret Santa for.

I was SO excited about the person I drew!!  She and I have similar personalities, so when I decided to be snarky and sarcastic about her gifts, I knew she would appreciate it.  For example, one of the survey questions was to name something we need more of, and she answered "time," so for Day One, I gave her a kitchen timer.  Under the category of things she can't live without, she wrote "pasta," so on Day Four, she'll be getting four boxes of different shaped pasta.

Did I also mention that each present also has a thoughtfully written haiku attached to it?

Despite her writing such helpful things on her survey, there were also things that I had to be creative with to accommodate.  One of her favorite smells is Warm Vanilla Brown Sugar, which is a Bath & Body Works scent.  Now, I hate shopping under normal circumstances (I mean, really hate it), and I especially hate shopping during the holidays (thank God for Amazon!), so I had NO desire whatsoever to trek anywhere near a Bath & Body Works to get something with this smell.  Another of her favorite things is homemade sugar cookies with icing.  I love cookie cutters to look at, but I really don't like actually using them.  I prefer cookies that I can just scoop up and drop onto the baking sheet.  Again, I had NO desire to spend an evening cutting shapes out of cookies for a gift.

Because clearly being someone's Secret Santa is all about me (*insert massive eye roll here*), I decided to combine these her favorite smell and her favorite treat into one gift.  I did a little Pinterest searching, and the Brown Sugar Cookies came to be.

Being that it was the first time I'd made these cookies, I stuck to the recipe exactly.  Josh, my faithful guinea pig and taste-tester, really liked them.  The recipe's description of these being a combination of a sugar cookie and a snickerdoodle is spot-on.  They're super chewy and the sugars that they're rolled in just before baking got nice and crusty on the outside.  I really like the difference in texture between the cookie and the sugar.

The only thing I'm not a big fan of with these cookies is their name.  I feel like for such a fun cookie, they need a much better name than just Brown Sugar Cookies.  I'm now taking suggestions to rename them something more creative than that.

Three dozen of these puppies are now cooking on wire racks.  Soon, they'll be packed into a bag or a box to be delivered to my secret person tomorrow morning (by the way, Coworkers Who Might Be Reading This, I am not your Secret Santa, so this post isn't ruining the surprise...and I think you all know who my person is anyway).  In case you're curious, here's tomorrow's haiku, just for good measure:

Homemade cookies, yum!
Brown Sugar Snickerdoodles
You don't have to share.