Devil's Food Oreos and a Ribbon Tree Centerpiece

I had a holiday-filled two days this past weekend. On Saturday afternoon I ran errands, finished all of my Christmas gift shopping, and sent a big box of presents to California. Saturday night I went to see the Nutcracker Ballet, and Sunday was spent baking cookies and attending my first Christmas cookie exchange at Jill's house!

It's been a while since I've posted any recipes on here, so I thought the cookies I made would be perfect to share with you all. It's a recipe that I got from my mom, which I think she got from a cookie exchange years ago (or maybe a coworker, or a magazine...lets just say my mom is my source since I'm not sure!).

Homemade Oreo Cookies

2 boxes of Devil's Food cake mix
4 eggs
1 1/2 cup shortening
1/3 cup sugar (for rolling)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Mix cake mix, eggs and shortening thoroughly. Roll dough into balls
and lightly roll in sugar in a separate bowl. Bake for 9 minutes. Cool on parchment paper or brown
paper bags (This step is important. Brown bags work best, but I've also used parchment paper successfully.).

(You can see some of the grease from the shortening under the cookies, that's why using the inside of brown bags work best, to absorb the grease.)

Cookie Filling

1/4 cup butter or margarine
8 ounce package of cream cheese
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 package of powdered sugar

Mix ingredients together to desired consistency. Add food coloring if desired. Spread filling on cooled cookies.

Makes approximately 36 oreo-style cookies (or 72 individual cookies),  and are 191.33 calories each with the filling.

To take to the cookie exchange, I also made cute little recipe cards to hand out.

And as you saw in the first picture in this post, I made a ribbon tree centerpiece for my cookie platter. This is something I saw in Michaels, and just like I did for the spruced up stockings, I snapped a photo with my cell phone to reference while I made my own version.

(as seen on the floral department counter)

This ribbon tree was really easy to make. But instead of using a foam cone shape like they did, I just created my own cone out of card stock, and cut it down to the height I wanted.

I cut out little strips of 4 different kinds of ribbon, looped them, and started hot gluing them to my cone.

To finish my ribbon tree off, I stuck two snowflake foam stickers together, and tucked an end into the top of my cone, with a little hot glue. So easy and cheap! And I must say, I like my version better than the one from Michaels, with the cleaner rows of ribbon branches. :)

I just used a couple of small pieces of Scotch tape to hold the tree to my platter, and added some extra ribbon to the edge of the platter with double sided tape for a festive display that would travel by car relatively well once covered with foil.

I've let myself eat exactly 1/2 of a cookie, since I'm on a diet. It was delicious, but I really need to find a way to make a lower calorie version! I love making these for almost any holiday too, since you can just switch out the color of frosting (think red, white and blue for the 4th of July, orange and chocolate for Halloween, etc).

Have you ever gone to a Christmas cookie exchange party? And do you have a go-to cookie recipe that works for any occasion?