I am about 4 1/2 recipes through the 12 Days of Cookies, as e-mailed to me by the nice Food Network people. Ordinarily I delete many of their e-mails, but something about a massive baking project piqued my curiosity.

So far I have learned a few things:

1) There is a difference between bittersweet and unsweetened chocolate. This I learned standing in the baking aisle at Meijer, puzzling about the four kinds of chocolate I needed.

2) There is such a thing as sanding sugar. It is the colored stuff you put on cookies. I had never heard that phrase until it stared back at me from an ingredient list. Fortunately the recipe also defined the term.

3) I LOVE parchment paper. My son, the resident dishwasher, likely will decide he likes it, too.

4) Chocolate wafers might not exist. What I needed was 20 of something like vanilla wafers, but chocolate.

(This intrigued my mother. “You have to use cookies to make cookies?” she asked.)

Unfortunately, standing in the store without the recipe in hand, I couldn’t guess at a substitute, although I was thinking those chocolate Teddy Grahams might work nicely.

Referral to the recipe later showed the wafers were for a crust for cheesecake bars, so I bought the Teddy Grahams and whacked away. It’s about five bears per wafer, in case you ever need to know.

This post originally appeared on ourMidland.com, the online home of the Midland (MI) Daily News. Republished with permission.