A Christmas Day Cookie and Wine Event

What better a way to feel homey and cozy on Christmas day, than by enjoying fresh-baked cookies and hot spiced wine!  With Christmas music playing in the background and four different nationalities swapping Christmas stories, it was a beautiful afternoon.

The only problem with this otherwise grand plan is that I started baking the cookies far too late.  People were scheduled to arrive around two... so starting the baking process at one wasn't the best thought-out plan of action I could have come up with.

I brought about 500 pounds worth of baking ingredients from Ansan to Guri (about two hours on the subway) to make these tasty treats.  We managed to get our hands on an oven - extremely hard to come across in Korea - so I couldn't let the opportunity pass me by!  The oven was located in a room otherwise used for storage one floor down from where we had the party.  I had a book, a chair, and a drying rack (for clothes) that I set the cookie trays on in between batches.  Unfortunately, with the oven being located where it was, I managed to miss most of the social aspect of the party.  Haha... oops.

The result?!  They were... ok.  Certainly not the best cookies I've ever made.  But they did the trick.  The one Korean guy proclaimed that they were the best cookies he's ever had, and helped himself to about a hundred.  Well, ok.  He's Korean.  They have TERRIBLE cookies in this country.  I would by no means give them such a good review. 

Nonetheless, in between batches I'd run the warm cookies up to the gathering and sneak in a couple sips of hot spiced wine.  Also on the menu, hot toddies and pan-fried cinnamon & brown sugar apples.  Yum!  We decided to class it up and have two giant wine glasses of milk for communal cookie-dipping purposes.

Shown in the picture are Edge (British man who is now the proud father of Bubby), Ji (Korean man who was blown away by the mediocre cookies), and Fabi (one of my favorite people in Korea - dating Ji).

It was all made worth it when one of the British guys thanked Jeff and I for throwing together this little Christmas event... as he was afraid that his first Christmas away from home would otherwise be spent eating kimbop (similar to a sushi roll, without the fish) at some small local kimbop shop all by his lonesome.