'Tis the season for baking Christmas treats to bring as gifts to friends and neighbors, to share with visitors and coworkers, and to fatten our own bellies before resolving to be healthier when the new year begins. Susan and the girls have been baking fiends this weekend. I am to bring to work tomorrow enough dessert items to feed around 150 people at an end-of-semester "open house" that our unit is hosting for campus faculty and staff. Thanks to my lovely ladies, it's all ready. Here's what they have baked--some of which I will take to work tomorrow, and some of which will become gifts for others throughout the holiday season:
- monster cookies
- Special K bars
- holiday snaps
- Scandinavian almond bars
- caramel crispies
- Scandinavian almond bread
- peanut butter temptations
- double-chocolate brownies
- fudge
- Almond Joy bars
- molasses cookies
- butterscotch cookies
- butter/vanilla sugar cookies
- reindeer eyes (made entirely by our daughters)
- hockey pucks (made entirely by our daughters)
My contribution? Supervising the frosting of the sugar cookies. Susan made several colors of powdered sugar frosting, set up frosting stations at the dining room table, and set the girls and me to work. Once I had convinced the girls how little frosting is actually needed per cookie (generally less frosting than cookie, contrary to their initial efforts), we all set to work frosting them and shaking decorative sprinkles upon them. Twelve dozen sugar cookies later, we were done, and the frosting was gone. Very fun!
(Yes, twelve dozen . . . of only one of the fifteen kinds of baking Susan did. Imagine the quantity of bars and cookies overall! Please come and help us eat them!)
It's so nice to have a baker's rack on our veranda. As Susan finishes and packages a particular batch of baked goods, she adds the container to the growing collection on the baker's rack, just a few convenient steps out the patio door off our dining room. The cookies, bars, and breads stay cold outdoors but are readily accessible when needed and don't take up room in our fridge or freezers. (If you have a sweet tooth, you now know where to find a Christmas treat when we're not home to offer you one!)
Hey Kevin,
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the move and all the changes the last couple of months! Sounds like the area fits you. Peter home safely from Iraq. Returned mid-September. We, too, have much to be thankful for this holiday season. Kate will be 4 in January...spending her birthday at Disneyland. Our first family vacation in awhile. Aren't kids great??? :)