Christmas Cookies

I LOVE CHRISTMAS BAKING!




Even the mess isn't the end of the world, because the end results are worth it. And after how messy everything gets my kitchen feels super clean after the clean up is done.








I include a couple childhood favorites from when we were small. I have a recipe that my great-grandma always made. Terran's family always has these cherry cookies that are waiting for their chocolate sauce. They never last long.




Along with the old; one has to have something new.... White Chocolate Raspberry Cookies are one of this years newbies.










My lovable, huggable, kissable sugar cookie decorator; he does fabulous work















And when the end comes I'm so glad that this only happens once a year. I made 10 types of cookies this season and ended up with 42 dozen cookies that are guaranteed to cling to your hips and enlarge your .... um .... heart.

Thanks for all the comments about the butterfly photo. I hope to post more photo shop stuff in the future. We'll see what T. & I come up with. :)

Naomi

PS. We give almost all the cookies away, I don't want you to think that we are little piggies.

Thanksgiving Flop

I love cooking!! Usually what I try turns out ok, not always great, but pretty good. We are celebrating Thanksgiving Friday (tomorrow) with Terran's family, so today T & I went hiking, had yummy pork tenderloin for dinner, and I worked on a cake I asked to bring to our dinner.

I have been drooling over this cake since I saw it on the cover on Bon Appetit Magazine. It definitely is a cake that needs to be shared. What better occasion than a family dinner? None that I can think of until I made the cake. It's a good thing that someone else is bringing pies.

Here's what has been tempting me all month. It's a devil's food cake with chocolate ganache filling and white chocolate peppermint cream in the center. The outer frosting is marshmallow peppermint. It sounds sooo yummy to me. I know it's a bit of a Christmas cake, but Christmas is already such a sweet holiday and I really wanted to enjoy this.

This is my cake!!! Please don't laugh, because I might hear you and start crying.

I have no idea what happened. The whole cake fell apart and frosting billowed out of it.

The first idea was to cover it with the marshmellow frosting and call it good. It would take a lot of frosting to fix this and even then....?

Finally out of desperation I just tore the whole thing apart and...

made a trifle. Lets hope it tastes good. :)

Picking up the pieces,

Naomi