Christmas recap, continued (baking edition, part 2)

After winning Bridget's book (from Bake at 350) this December, I got a little excited to decorate cookies. Plus, I knew it would be a fun activity for LE and me to do. Once I started, I didn't want to stop. It was a lot of fun for me even though it kind of makes a bit of a mess during the prep.

I didn't actually receive the book until January, but I was familiar with Bridget's recipes and website already. I coupled the recipe with some helpful tips that I have mentally filed away over time from a few different cookie blogs:

• Use two clean yard sticks or wooden dowels on the counter to roll on so that your cookies come out perfectly uniform in thickness. You have to roll less dough at once, but it's foolproof.
• Roll out your dough on top of wax paper/parchment/Silpat as well as with a piece of wax/parchment paper between the roller and dough in order to eliminate the need for flouring your surface.
• Bake your cookies on day the day before you prep your icing and decorate to prevent energy burn out. Decorated roll out cookies create a lot of dishes and mess (especially if doing alongside a child). 
• Start with the right supplies to make it easy. For beginners, everything aside from the mixer can be purchased at a craft store, like Michaels, with coupons to make it inexpensive. Grab at least two squeeze bottles, disposable piping bags, some couplers, and piping tips (I used a size 1, 2, and 3). According to the cookie experts (not me), the AmeriColor gel food colorings and Ateco meringue powders are best in quality/taste, though you could definitely make do with the Wilton brand ones that you'll find at Michaels. 
• Use tall glasses with damp paper towels at the bottom to hold your piping bags when they're not in use.
• Try to come up with designs that only use 2-3 colors to simplify how many bags/bottles/mess you'll create.
• Freeze your cut out dough on the cookie sheet for 5-10 minutes before it goes in the oven. This helps the cookie keep its shape while baking.

These cookies were made with Bridget's gingerbread recipe and royal icing recipe (also found in her book), which is firm enough to package up and stack without crumbling yet still chewy and soft. I'm not a gingerbread cookie person (or so I thought), but I found myself enjoying these. 

Simple Bite's Aimee also reviewed the recipe on her blog, which is where I won the cookbook and got the idea to use this gingerbread recipe to begin with.

Also, LE decorated her own cookies next to me. She helped me roll out the dough and press down the cookie cutters. Then, she had her own baking sheet with a bowl of pink icing (surprise, surprise!), some sprinkles, and a spoon to pour the icing onto her cookies. This let our 2 1/2 year old do hers without needing help while I decorated mine.

(Christmas recap, baking edition part 3 is coming tomorrow!)

Christmas recap (continued)

We had a blizzard which left all four of us housebound for a couple of days. We got 19 inches in a day.

Instagram photo taken from our 2nd floor

We stayed inside and did things like make clay ornaments. After they were dry, we colored Elmer's Glue with green food coloring and painted one of them green. The other two little ones were coated with plain Elmer's to protect them from grime over time.

LE had her first hot chocolate. She prefers it cold. Go figure.

LE made a Christmas tree from popsicle sticks that I trimmed with scissors (not easy to trim, mind you).  She colored the sticks with a marker (you could use paint), coated it well with Elmer's, and then applied little decorations.

We also made a Borax snowflake. I recommend making ones smaller than what we did if you want to do this as well. Maybe do them 2 inches wide and use wide mouth canning jars? They are really easy.

After the winds from the blizzard died down, we took the girls out to sled in our backyard and make snow angels, something LE had been requesting since the last small snowfall melted. We got them both bundled up but thought we'd put LE's mittens on outside.

Hannah cried almost from the moment she got stuffed into the Baby Bjorn. I got this photo of John pushing LE on the disc, and the next moment, LE was crying because her hands were too cold. We all headed back inside, officially making our adventure a bust. We spent longer getting dressed than we did outside. Oh well!

We made lots and lots of cookies. LE is super sensitive to noises, so even the mixer was a little too loud for her. I'll do a separate post on the cookie details. One day, we conducted a bake-off between two recipes to figure out which is our favorite. Another day, I made loads of chocolate rollout cookies topped with a mint ganache and sprinkles for a cookie exchange that got cancelled by the blizzard. On Christmas Eve, we made gingerbread cookies and decorated with royal icing (I'll let you guess which ones were LE's!). It was lots of fun, and our neighbors received most of them. :)

My dad's parents came up to visit one day. As you may have seen on Instagram, we think Hannah looks a lot like Grandma U.

LE's Godfather, Michael, stopped for a last minute visit, too. LE had a fun time playing with him for the evening.

And John's parents stopped by on their way up and back from northern Wisconsin, where they spent Christmas. Of course, LE picked out her Cardinals shirt to wear for breakfast with them.

I'll do a separate post on Christmas Day and the couple of days after. For now, this has already been an enormous post! December was a busy month!

Chocolate Covered Peanut Butter Balls

Cookie exchanges are among us! I made these easy peanut butter balls as my contribution to cookie platters for the volunteer teachers who play with and teach LE for two hours on Thursdays. She adores them and often has to be dragged away when the two hours are up.

I found this recipe on Pinterest. Though it took a long time to patiently dip each ball, these were really easy to make and don't use the oven. The nice thing about these is that you can start and stop at any point without affecting the end product.

I imagine you could speed up the dipping process by doing it the way that the original poster does it-- get a big spoonful of chocolate and use your fingers to dip the ball. I'm not keen on using my hands all over the food I'm going to distribute, especially if it's uncooked. Even with washed hands, I feel dirty doing it. That's just me.

To get around rolling the balls in my hands, I quickly made all of the balls with a small portion scoop. Then, I dipped them one by one by balancing a ball on a fork, dipping it into the chocolate,  and scraping the bottom against the edge of the bowl or another fork to remove the excess chocolate.

(Instagram phone photo)

Chocolate Dipped Peanut Butter Balls

Adapted slightly from this recipe
Makes approximately 70 balls

You can easily scale this down or up depending on your needs. It's wise to have some extra chocolate chips handy in the event that you run out. I used 1 3/4 bags total.

Ingredients
1 jar smooth peanut butter, 18 oz (I used Simply Jif)
4 tbs butter, melted
1 lb (approx 3 cups) powdered sugar
3 cups Rice Krispies cereal
1 bag milk chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli)
1 bag semi-sweet chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli 60% Cacao)

In a large bowl, mix together (by hand with a sturdy spoon or by electric mixer) peanut butter, melted butter, and powdered sugar. Add the cereal and stir/mix until a ball. Add more peanut butter if you need more glue or powdered sugar if it's too sticky. (I didn't need to do any adjustments.)

Scoop with a small 1 1/2 tsp portion scoop the peanut butter mixture onto a lined cookie sheet or two (parchment paper, wax paper, or Silpat all work). Alternatively, roll into a ball in your hands 1 1/2 tsp of the mixture.

In a heatproof small bowl, heat together half of each type of chocolate in the microwave. Start at one minute on 50% power, stir, then 30 second 50% power increments until it's all completely melted and smooth. (Alternatively, use a double-boiler or glass bowl over a saucepan with barely simmering water).

Using a fork or your fingers, dip the balls one by one into the bowl, scrape and drip off the excess chocolate, and place on the lined cookie sheet. Continue with all the balls, reheating the chocolate as needed.

If you desire to add sprinkles, do a few at a time so that the chocolate isn't too soft (the sprinkles will slide down) or hard (they won't stick).

Refrigerate until the chocolate is completely firm then store in an airtight container in the fridge. These can be eaten at room temp or cold. These also freeze well.

Enjoy!

Granola Nut Clusters

It's not secret that I follow the Smitten Kitchen blog and love almost all of the recipes that I've made from there. Deb recently posted the recipe for these granola nut clusters, and I have to spread the word. I made these 5 times in one week because everyone who had them said they loved them and wanted the recipe.

I was surprised by how fast and easy these were. It only takes a food processor, 5-10 minutes of hands on time, and 20-30 minutes in the oven.  I like to save for breakfast the leftover granola that doesn't stick to the nut after baking. You could give these as neighbor gifts in lieu of sweets. I'm sure you'd be thanked!

Since I really didn't change the recipe from how it was written, I'm going to just send you to Smitten Kitchen to see how they're done.

the first (real) snow

It snowed our first real snow of the season on Sunday, December 9. We have had a couple of days of flurries before, but this was the first snow that actually accumulated.

John took Monday off of work since he has been traveling so much lately, and we got to build our first ever snowman. The snow packed well and was the perfect type for building a snowman.

LE had a wardrobe malfunction and lost her mittens. It looks like she's holding an invisible snowball here, but I really think she was just brushing the snow off of her hands.

Fast forward a ball or two, and here's John putting on the finishing touches! Coal for the eyes and buttons, a carrot for the nose, and cranberries for the mouth. We don't live near many trees, so we don't have arms yet. We did bring home some of LE's "trees" from the tree farm; maybe we could add those in later.

Here are the proud snowman creators with the finished product. The snowman looks really cute in our backyard.

Speaking of really cute, we can't forget Hannah! She was there, too. It's not really all that easy to take photos and try to rock a baby at the same time.

During LE's nap, John went out to buy a super tall ladder to put up our Christmas lights. H and I helped (mostly moral support mixed with a little ladder support). We snapped a couple of photos with our phone.

trimming the tree & cookies with friends

John left for a trip the day after we brought our glorious tree inside, so I set up the tripod to capture just a couple of photos of the girls and me. I wasn't going for award-winning photos here; I just wanted to document that I was, in fact, present, too! 

LE and I decorated our tree together while Hannah napped. This was the only time that she was allowed to touch the tree. Surprisingly, this hasn't even been a temptation for her.

After the last ornament was hung, LE snatched up her whole collection of nativity kings and Christmas sock monkeys (she has 4) and demanded, "Take a picture!"

We then went to my friend Monica's house for a quick cookie decorating playdate. Monica has two kiddos-- Oliver and Natalie-- whom LE adores. "Olligar" is a year older than LE, and "Nallie" is a year younger. 

In case you weren't aware, decorating cookies is very serious business.

Advent traditions are well underway!

Picking out our tree

A couple of weeks ago, we went as a family to pick out our tree from a cute little tree farm just up the road. We have always gotten table top trees in the past, so this was our first year to go cut down our own. Actually, two years ago we went to this same farm to cut down a tree. It had just snowed and was beautiful, but the crowds coupled with sticker shock scared us away.

We went on a weekday this year, and we were the only ones there, which is a good thing because we had no idea what we wanted. LE picked out this "tree."

Hannah was unsure. ;)

We continued to look a little bit longer until we found the perfect one. 

Here she is!

We made our way back to the barn.

One of us got a little distracted.

The lady there shared with us that if you have a nest fall from your tree, you'll have good luck.

We waited as the Shakee shook the loose needles and potential nests out of the tree.

Annnd, we got one! (LE doesn't care.)

John and the lady bound it up.

 And got it on the car.

Success!