Sugarplum Fairies

These little gals are all dressed up with somewhere to go! This is my offering for our cookie exchange tonight for our Ladies' Christmas Party. They are my favorite Christmas cookie, I remember making them with my mom when I was younger. There is a maraschino cherry hiding under that decadent fudge-like frosting.

The basic recipe can be found here. My original recipe is called Chocolate Cherry Sugarplums and has a few changes to it. Instead of adding the cherry and frosting before baking, the original has you press the cherry halves into the cookie immediately after removing from the oven, then frosting when cool, which is what I do. And none of this drizzling stuff, slather it on. Actually the frosting is so fudgy I usually just put a dollop to cover the cherry and it spreads on its own. The recipe yields almost 2 1/2 dozen but the frosting will easily frost 5 dozen so I always double the cookie recipe but you could just as easily halve the frosting recipe.