They taste better than they look.

I’m not a big baseball fan – in fact, I’m not a big sports fan in general – but I will take any excuse to bake cookies. I like watching an exciting baseball or football game and though I generally tend to root for New York teams by virtue of my geography, I wouldn’t consider myself a die-hard fan.

This year, the Major League Baseball World Series happened to fall a little bit closer to the holiday season, a bit closer to the best time of the year for baking Christmas cookies. This year, I started a little bit early and baked a few batches of Drop In & Decorate sugar cookies with the intention of donating them to a Ronald McDonald House in New York City just in time for Game 6.

What I didn’t count on was running out of icing after half a dozen cookies. It seemed silly to make the trek to the Upper East side to drop off only six cookies, so I distributed the few that I’d already made to friends.

If you’re not familiar, Drop In & Decorate is a tax-exempt non-profit organization based on a simple concept: bake some cookies; gather a group of family, friends,
neighbors or co-workers to decorate the
cookies together and donate the cookies to a nonprofit agency serving
basic human needs in your own community.

Lydia founded the organization in 2002 (which may or may not have been the year I graduated from high school) and I teamed up with her last year to lend some of my public relations expertise. This holiday season, someone, somewhere in the U.S. will donate the 10,000th cookie.

Yeah. Even I couldn’t eat that many cookies.

This year Pillsbury has donated VIP coupons, worth
$3.00 each, off any Pillsbury product — including sugar cookie mix,
icing and flour for the first 50 people who plan to host a Drop In & Decorate
event this year (max. 5 coupons per person).  If you’re planning on hosting a cookie-decorating party, write to lydia [at] ninecooks [dot] com and we’ll even include a Comfort Grip
cookie cutter, donated by Wilton (while supply lasts).

For more, read on about the Drop In & Decorate gathering I hosted last December and the cookie decorating party that Molly and I had in May.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Did you notice that I’ve been posting more frequently than usual this week? In celebration of National Novel Writing Month, some bloggers choose to commemorate November with NaBloPoMo, or National Blog Posting Month. I’ve challenged myself to post daily this month and hope that you’ll challenge yourselves to read them all!