Happy Friday everyone! Today is my first post for the #countdowntoblogmas collab. This week our posts have been all about recipes and traditions and today I want to share with you a recipe that is also a tradition for me and (half of) my family.

I am by no means 100% Italian if that's what you inferred by the title. I describe my heritage as "European Mutt". But despite my lack of a prevalent italian familial background, my mothers side of the family has kept strong ties, and has strong roots to, and Italian history. Every other year my 'italian family' has a christmas party which we call the Borrocino Christmas party, Borrocino being our family name. One of the staples of this party is what we call Italian Cookies. (the real name for them is anisette cookies)

These are my favorite cookies! I look forward to the holiday season every year for the sole reason that I get to have at least one of these cookies with almost every meal. Now I know that not everyone in the world loves these cookies when they buy them from a store, cause even I don't really love those ones, but the ones we make from home are amazing.

Recipe

warning: only use this recipe if you want to make A LOT of cookies: you can scale it down if you only want 100 or less.

click the image or click here for a printable version of the recipe

One of the special things about these cookies is that they are all hand rolled and tied into cookies knots. After you make the dough be sure to kneed it before you either hand roll them. Or you can do the store bought 'dots' look where you simply roll a little ball of dough and bake them, but it's not as fun. I will be doing a video of how to hand roll these later this month when I am back home for the holidays.