Party Update

So our holiday party was awesome. And the number 1 requested recipe is this:

Crack Candy
Saltine crackers

2 sticks (1 cup) real butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 bag (12 oz.) chocolate chips

Cover a cookie sheet with saltine crackers. Melt butter and brown sugar--bring to a boil and let cook until mixture gets frothy (about 3 minutes or so). Pour over crackers. Bake at 400°F for 4-5 minutes. It will bubble. Remove from oven and sprinkle with chocolate chips. Let chips sit 5 minutes. Use the back of a spoon to spread chocolate evenly across crackers. Refrigerate at least 1 hour then break into pieces to serve.

This tastes like toffee and is absolutely delicious. I will post pictures of it from our party once I get them uploaded to the computer.

Baking Update

I'm really quite proud of myself.
Sitting in my freezer right now are:

VEGAN TREATS
1 batch french buttercream
1 batch snickerdoodles
1 batch peanut blossoms
2 batches chocolate chip cookies
2 batches sugar cookies
1 batch buckeyes (to be fair, J made these)
1 batch reese bars
1 batch russian teacakes
1 batch candy cane cookies

NON-VEGAN TREATS
1 batch gingerbread people and christmas trees
1 batch french buttercream (tinted green and red)
2 batches rice krispy treats
1 batch peppermint bark
4 loaves applesauce bread

STILL TO BAKE
4 loaves applesauce bread--DONE!
1 batch non-vegan peanut blossoms--DONE!
1-2 loaves cranberry-nut bread
1 batch peanut butter chocolate pillows

THINGS I'M ON THE FENCE ABOUT
1 batch kolczakis
1 batch chocolate peppermint bark cookies

Any other suggestions? A, M, Surf, Cali, Geg--any requests for things for me to send to A&M's for our holiday gathering??

Let Baking Season Begin!

This is R licking the beaters after our first baking session of the holiday season, two days after Thanksgiving. She's licking French Buttercream batter off of the beaters.

Since then, I've been madly baking in preparation for the upcoming holidays. Sitting in my freezer right now are:

2 batches of chocolate chip cookies
1 batch of peanut blossoms (but I definitely need to make another batch of these)
snickerdoodles
2 batches of rice krispy treats
2 batches of sugar cookies--these are among my favorites because they're so festive.
4 loaves of applesauce bread

Here we are working on the sugar cookies together. R had a blast with her own set of dough and cutters and roller. I eventually broke out another big rolling pin for her to use when she got tired of using the small one.

Making Chocolate Pizza

We finally made chocolate pizza! The recipe was difficult to veganize, though, and we had the wrong size pan (I used a regular size cookie sheet which is quite a bit larger than a 12" pizza pan) so it came out really hard, and a bit too greasy (I let R go to town greasing the cookie sheet and didn't think to use a paper towel to cut back on the actual amount of margarine on the sheet). I'm going to try again with real eggs instead of egg replacer and see how that comes out.

But R had a terrific time decorating, and the peanut butter frosting is YUM!
Check out the live-action video of R decorating the pizza (and answering some questions from me about what she's making!)


S: Hey R, what are you making?
R: Making. Putting. Putting, m, m, m. Putting all all all. . . over. . . putting all of these on the pizza.
S: Oh. Is it gonna be yummy?
R: Yeah. That's a decorate. We're decorate (ing). Pi - zza. (sing-songy) We decorating the pizza. The pizza, the piiiiiiiiiiii. Za.

A sing-songy day

R is singing in her crib right now. It might be Frere Jacques or it could be wheels on the bus. Hard to tell. She sang ABC's to Grandma and Grandpa on the phone tonight. On the way up to her bath, she wanted to climb the stairs herself, saying, "I hold handle," and reaching for the rail. This inevitably led to her saying, "Here's my spout," and continuing on with "I'm a little teapot." In the bath we sang "Old McDonald had a farm" and I let her supply the animals and sounds. After making the cow say "Oink" and a good number of ducks quacking, she decided that on his farm, he had water. After which we were singing "Old McDonald had a bath," and in his bath he had milk. It kind of petered out from there, but we had fun while it lasted.

Here's a video of her singing the ABCs all the way up to P and then demanding that we sing with her.


On the topic of cute things R says:

I had to get a video of R saying "A little bit." I love it. When she's asking for something and not being a terrible two, she has a tendency to make her request more reasonable by adding "Just a little bit." She pulled it out when there were cookies out tonight and I had to get it on video.


And why were there cookies out, you ask? A few shots of R's afternoon activity with Mommy should answer that question:



Yeah, it was a good day.