2013 - Week 52

Hello from Week 52, the last full week of the year. My, this year has sure flown by.

Being as it was Christmas this week, I didn't have time for much exercising, but I did do a little Wii boxing, now that we have our TV all set up and then there was a lot of moving things around and cleaning to get our house ready for company, so I'm going to say that counts :)

We had a fantastic time with our families and celebrating the birth of our Savior. I hope you all got to spend some time with loved ones as well. If you happen to be baking a breakfast for those you love, might I suggest this really tasty and tropical recipe: Sunshine Baked Oatmeal.

It really brightened up our cold morning and it was very good :)

My only other cooking was to make the amazing Truffle Mac & Cheese again (you can get the recipe and see my original attempt here), oh so good. I hope you'll give it a try sometime too (or at least petition Noodles & Co. to bring it back on their menu ;))

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to every one of you :) See you next year!

2013 - Week 51

Hello from Week 51 :) Now that I've given all of these treats away as Christmas presents, I can share them with you all on my blog. I was just baking up a STORM this week . . . whew, it was exhausting, but so nice to be able to share things made with love (and butter) with those I love :)

Some of these recipes were old favorites: shortbread and royal icing cookies, and others were not as familiar or first time trials: peanut brittle, cranberry treasures, toffee, and trail mix bites.

The shortbread was one of my one-day challenges last December and it was such a hit last Christmas that I decided to make it again. I made three batches and I found that the first two (in which I just microwaved my butter slightly to get it to approximately room temperature) turned out much better than the batch where I properly left it out on the counter to acclimate on its own. I don't really know why that is, but there you go, one example where not planning ahead actually improved the results.

Shortbread and 105 cutout cookies :)

The royal icing cookies were the most time consuming project, but thankful my lovely friend (who I gave the first knit headband to) helped me with the decorating, and provided the recipes for me to use. We didn't quite follow the "10-second rule" that is described in the link for the royal icing recipe because we didn't want to have to make two consistencies for each frosting color (one for outlining and one for filling in/flooding) and it still worked out beautifully. This is the recipe for that cookies that I used and they were really tasty:

SUGAR COOKIES

1.5 cups powdered sugar

1 cup butter, softened

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla

0.5 teaspoon almond extract

2.5 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon cream of tartar

~     Mix powdered sugar, butter, egg, vanilla, and almond extract.  Mix in flour, baking soda and cream of tartar.  Cover and refrigerate at least 2 hours.  Heat oven to 375.  Divide dough into halves.  Roll each half on a lightly floured surface.  Cut into shapes.  Bake until edges are light brown, 7 to 8 minutes (or a bit longer depending on your oven). 

I'm not quite sure who to give credit to for that recipe, but whoever created it did a nice job :)

Sorry I don't have a picture of the rest of the treats . . . these guys were the stars ;)

Inspiration for the light bulbs: Inspiration

Reindeer using gingerbread men shape with mint M&M noses . . . so cute.
(Thanks to footballgrl16 for the idea)

For the peanut brittle, the recipe is very simple, but written for someone with a 700 Watt microwave. Mine is a 1000 W, but I don't know how old it is or exactly how much power it's still giving out, so it was a bit of a guessing game. I found a 700 W to 1000 W cooking time conversion chart and just kind of went from there. The recipe calls for a 6 - 7 minute first cook and a 2 - 3 minute second cook and after three batches, I determined that 5:15 and 2:15 worked out pretty well for me. I could have done it a bit longer because it wasn't quite as golden as I was hoping for, but even the paler batches (I started with 4:45 / 1:45 cook times) tasted just fine and were enjoyed by everyone who ate them.

The cranberry treasures are a recipe that my in-laws make every year . . . with a little bit of a twist. They usually make "raisin treasures", but since I'm not the hugest fan of raisins, last year I suggested that we substitute dried cranberries instead . . . mmm, instant improvement in my book :) The little cookie bits were kind of putsy to make, and my husband did the coating and clustering of all of the other bits (they are basically chocolate covered clusters of mini-marshmallows, tiny cookies, and dried cranberries . . . yum) so I can't comment on that, but they turned out great. Give this recipe a try and let me know how you like it:

CRANBERRY TREASURES

1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup sugar, 2 TBSP cream, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1 cup flour, 1/4 tsp salt, 1 cup raisins or dried cranberries (optional: add marshmallows and nuts as desired)

1. Cream butter and sugar. 

2. Add cream and vanilla and blend well. 

3. Mix in flour and salt.

4. Shape dough into long 1/4" rolls. Place on ungreased cookie sheet and cut into 1/2" lengths. Bake at 325 degrees for 10-12 minutes. Cool.

5. Prepare Glaze:

6 oz. chocolate chips, 3 TBSP light corn syrup, 1 TBSP water. Melt these in microwave or over hot water for glaze. Stir together.

Stir together cookie pieces, raisins, nuts, marshmallows, etc. with glaze. When all is well coated, drop onto waxed paper and allow to cool. May be refrigerated to speed cooling.

On a not so pleasant note, I'm fairly certain the Devil possessed my toffee (not really, but boy was it frustrating, and I'm ashamed to admit that I skipped our Advent church service to keep stirring this blasted toffee). I suppose after all of the success of the other recipes, something was bound to go wrong, but this toffee just went very, very wrong. I should have known it was going to happen, because the same thing happened last time I used the recipe, but I was hoping for better results this time . . . insanity, right? Here is the recipe, in case you dare try it:

1 lb. butter (I always bake with unsalted)

2 C sugar

1 - 12 oz. bag chocolate chips (I used milk chocolate this time)

1 C chopped nuts (I used pecans)

Butter jelly roll pan. Cook butter and sugar in heavy saucepan over moderate heat (stirring constantly) until hard crack stage (310 F on candy thermometer). It will be caramel colored. Quickly pour into pan until hardened. Melt chips over hot water or in the microwave. Spread half the amount of chips with knife. Sprinkle with half of the nuts. Let set and then turn over and spread remaining half of chips and sprinkle with the remaining nuts. Let set and then break into pieces using a knife.

The premise of the recipe is good, but be warned, it will most likely "break" on you. After 3.5 hours stirring and breaking at least 7 times, I don't think I will ever use this recipe again. I'm still willing to try another toffee recipe because I like toffee a lot, but this one is very finicky, if you ask me. I love the lady who gave it to me, and her toffee is fantastic, so it's probably just me, but you have been warned. I think a new candy thermometer would have helped a lot too because mine is one of those old fat ones and therefore it impeded my stirring in the section of the pot where it was clipped. If your toffee does break, you can fix it by adding a tablespoon or two of hot water, but I did that so often that I had ended up with way too much water in it and as a result had to cook way longer than I should have to get it to come together nicely. Eventually I just took my candy thermometer out and stirred it steadily until it was all back together again and used my digital thermometer every once and a while to check the temperature. It was probably not the best for my nice thermometer, but at least I fixed the toffee . . . that was so frustrating. 

Last but not least is the simple trail mix bites. They were very easy and tasty. I wanted to make something at least sort of healthy for my health conscious brother . . . I think they turned out rather well. I might have made them bigger than the blog called for, but oh well ;)

Finally, in addition to all of this baking and cooking, I also did some Power Yoga and finished another knit headband (the same pattern as I made last week). I think I'm getting the hang of cables now and I'm anxious to try something new . . . maybe learning to knit in the round? Sounds scary, but I found a hat pattern that I want to make so I guess I had better learn :)

I hope your week was not as busy as mine and that you are never in need of any Christmas treat recipes ;) Talk to you next week.

2013 - Week 50

Hello from Week 50 :)

More power yoga for me this week, and I definitely needed it for all of the treats that I'll be eating in the coming weeks ;)

Happy (and warm) knitter

The biggest news this week is: My Scarf Is FINISHED :) Yay :) I like it a lot and I hope that you do too. This is the pattern that I used: Bella Lana scarf. I thought 32 stitches was a bit wide though, so I dropped it down to 24 and it still worked out great. I used almost 3 complete skeins of yarn because I like my scarves a bit longer. I ended up repeating the pattern of 18 rows sixteen and a half times I believe. I didn't do the best bind off because I didn't know how to do a rib bind off, but if you make this, I would recommend figuring that out because my bound edge looks a little flared. Oh well, I still love it :)

Isn't it cool?

Yay sparkly :) 

Since I loved my scarf so much, I decided to try my hand at a new cable knitting pattern, this time a headband though, for a few of my friends' Christmas presents. I used this pattern: Fraga Headband. It was interesting trying to learn a few new knitting skills, the crochet provisional cast on, and the kitchener stitch bind off, but I think I did okay for my first attempts. Luckily the yarn was a bit forgiving and any mistakes easily blend in :) Both the the recipients loved them I think.

Cozy

Lovely lady in a lovely headband :) 

I did try two of the crock pot meals this week too. The beef stew was just okay, but the black bean taco soup, which I will dub "Nacho Soup" was really yummy (especially after the addition of some sour cream and cheese and scooped up with chips . . . mmm). Sorry there aren't any pictures . . . we ate it too fast ;)

One more thing to share this week . . . cornmeal tree cookies. You may remember from earlier this year (see blog post here) when I made these cute cornmeal sugar cookies for Valentine's Day and I'm pretty sure that mine were prettier than Martha Stewarts (although she gets all the credit for this awesome recipe). I wanted something relatively easy that still looked impressive for some cookie exchanges that I was a part of. My cousin Sara also made these for her Christmas cookie exchange . . . great minds think alike :) I decided to change it up a bit though and turn them into glazed trees. Here are the results:

Mmm . . . glazed trees :) 

I think they turned out nice, and they really do taste good. I hope all of my fellow cookie exchangers enjoyed them :)

I hope you are all having a wonderful time preparing for Christmas. Stay warm, and I'll talk to you next week :)

2013 - Week 49

Hello from Week 49. I have to make this quick because I'm super busy in Christmas mode now . . . ah.

First of all, more Power yoga this week. It's getting easier (probably because I've been going every week) and I'm liking it more, even if I still wish it were warmer in the studio ;)

I made the bean soup recipe (one of my frozen crock pot meals) and it was another disappointment, I'm sorry to report. The beans were still a tad hard, the rice kind of disintegrated, and it was too salty for me. I think if it had gotten a chance to cook longer and the beans had gotten done it would have been better. I made two of those, so next time I'm going to try for a longer cook time and maybe add some more rice. I guess that's one of the issues with making the same freezer meal twice . . . if it's good you get to enjoy it again, but if it's not then you have to eat it again ;) I'm keeping tabs on which ones I really enjoy and when I do my next round of freezer crock pot meal prep, I'll make those again and discard the recipes for the others. And yes, there will be a next time . . . I've saved SO much time by not having to cook and just making these for weeks now. There have been a few other things I've cooked here and there, but I've been spending a lot less time doing it these days. I don't think it will work out so well in the summertime when we don't want to be eating hot soup every night, but on these chilly winter nights, having a hot meal ready when I get home is awesome :) If you'd like to try it, check out my blog here for the recipes that I made, and if you have any freezer crock pot meals that you love, please share them because I'm trying to put together a list of recipes to try next.

My new thing for this week was that my husband and I got our first real full-sized Christmas tree now that we have a nice house to put it in.

The proper way to carry a tree ;) 

Our tree :) 

Isn't it lovely? I hope you and yours are enjoying the excitement surrounding the upcoming Christmas season and remember to keep Christ in Christmas :) See you next week!