Back to Basics Christmas

Happy New Year everyone! I just discovered that I am 23 posts away from 100 blog posts. So now I'm pretty dedicated to making it there. Now that I'm happily in my new home, I have yet another new kitchen to get used to baking in. And what better way to kick off baking in a new kitchen than with the annual Christmas baking insanity with my dear friend? Devotees will recall that last year ended in disaster and tears and sad cookies and truffles. This year, we decided it was time to go back to basics to get our Christmas baking mojo back. We decided to go with a plan of all things we had made before with only one new cookie and NO TRUFFLES. It was hard dropping the truffles but after last year, we really needed the break.

So here's the plan:
1) Palmiers
2) Walnut balls (the CORRECT recipe this time!)
3) M&M cookies
4) Cookie press cookies (i.e. Christmas trees)
5) Double chocolate cookies
6) White chocolate ginger cookies (our new addition)

Seems like a fair plan, right? Even more relaxing, we had a slumber party planned so we could do the baking over two days! Well, you know what they say about plans...

For reference, I had only moved into my house two weeks prior, on the day before Thanksgiving. So to say I was a bit frazzled and knew where nothing was is an understatement. The result of this was basically me looking in my cabinet, saying "I've got the walnuts and the M&Ms and surely I have everything else I'll need", and then actually having none of what I needed. We went to bake the first batch of cookies only to discover that I had no puff pastry for the palmiers and only one stick of unsalted butter. Who runs out of butter??? This girl.

I enlisted my dear husband to run to the supermarket for us. Because we didn't feel like going outside. Really and truly, that was the reasoning. Since I had my husband going to the store anyway, I decided to also add things that probably needed replacing in my cabinet. Baking powder from 2012 is probably no longer super effective. His list consisted of baking powder, baking soda, puff pastry, some spices for the ginger cookies, and five pounds of butter. "Five pounds?!?" he says. "Of course, five pounds!" we says. So off he goes. While he's there, our evening looks like this:

Not pictured: Home Alone on the TV. Priorities. Finally, my dear husband arrived (about the same time as our whole cheese pizza just for me us) with this:

We. Could. Not. Stop. Laughing.

Technically, I suppose he correctly bought five pounds of butter. But it's whipped butter! Which I have never bought in my entire life and has never been in our fridge in our entire relationship! I attempted to research if we could even use whipped butter and the resounding answer from the internet was "nope." Also not pictured: the world's largest box of baking soda and the TWO cans of baking powder (which, in fairness, a nice lady at the supermarket suggested he buy after hearing we make several hundred cookies). Remember, we were only getting these ingredients because I hadn't used up the stuff I bought FIVE YEARS AGO. [I love you, husband! Thanks for trying!]

So where does this leave us? Eating pizza, drinking wine, and watching Home Alone while my dear husband goes back to Shop Rite at 11 pm to return the offensive butter and no baking at all on Day 1. I guess we were no worse off than any other year though.

We woke up in the morning to nice normal sticks of butter in the fridge with a pound left out on the counter to soften overnight (nice idea, but the first thing we did was take out the other four pounds. We blew through that first pound in about 2 minutes.) So we could get right to baking! We started off with the cookie press cookies. We didn't do any planning for a numerical goal or for how many batches we wanted for each so I think we tripled the batch for the cookie press so we could do four shapes and colors. This logic made sense early in the morning. In reality, we made two types in two colors. But that was fine, easy to accomplish and brought our cookie count to a quick 150 or so.

I think next we made the ginger cookies. Those were the new ones and required several steps so I think we decided to get them out of the way early. The dough was pretty easy to put together except for one thing: when I was making my list of spices, I didn't actually check the recipe and was just going from memory. So instead of getting nutmeg, I told my dear husband to get allspice. Whoops. I didn't have any nutmeg. But instead of fretting, we just used the allspice and hoped it would taste good. [It did.] The first batch of cookies was a little bit underbaked and the cookies were a little too big so after that we made them a bit smaller and cooked them a bit longer. Then they were perfect circles of gingery excellence. We put them aside for later because the next step was dipping them in chocolate and piping adorable holly berries on them. No potential for failure there whatsoever.

On to the next critically important step: walnut balls! We were so heartbroken last year that we needed to take extra care this year. We checked, double-checked, and triple-checked the recipe. We carefully measured everything. We remembered to sift the powdered sugar. Aaaaaaaaaaand...they're perfect! Little nutty balls of heaven. Note for next year though: sifting the powdered sugar does nothing. We won't waste our time next year.

With those out of the way, we turned our attention to our next potential problem. Namely, we started to get afraid of running out of flour and, you guessed it, butter! Around this point, we were also talking about taking a coffee and breakfast break. As we were discussing our urgent need for coffee, an angelic voice from upstairs yelled "give me a few minutes and I'll get you coffee!" Husband to the rescue! The kicker was when he was taking our coffee order and I threw in the "hey, while you're out, could you pick up some more butter?" and his jaw almost hit the floor. His immediate reaction seemed to be "no, you have more than enough butter" but then he was very sweet and got us flour and butter. Which we didn't end up needing. Whoops.

About this point, we started to divide and conquer. I took out the puff pastry to thaw for the palmiers and started collecting the various chocolate needed for the double chocolate cookies while my friend worked on making the base for the M&M cookies. I melted A LOT of chocolate. I don't even want to tell you how much. But those cookies are a tried and true favorite even if they aren't very Christmas-y. On the other hand, one of our goals was to make a pretty tin of cookies with lots of colors and designs so it helped fill out the tins in that way. One of our other goals was to make the M&M cookies smaller this year, which we accomplished, but it was much harder to get the M&Ms into the cookies fast enough. We also baked up the chocolate cookies which take forever to bake so we finally got a little break. I also ran out of cocoa. Tired yet?!?

Speaking of chocolate, we still have to dip those ginger cookies! At this point, we had completely run out of space in the kitchen and on my dining room table so that means dipping the cookies in chocolate and then laying them on wax paper on the floor. SorryNotSorry. We started the chocolate melting adventure by choosing bad vessels for dipping and realizing that we each needed our own bowls of melted chocolate if we were ever going to finish. We used white Wilton candy melts and apparently the thing that makes chocolate smooth for dipping is adding shortening and NOT increasing the microwaving time. Thanks, Google! It actually worked perfectly except that I ran out of white chocolate candy melts and white chocolate and my giving a crap level was quite low at this point. So even though we were only dipping half of each cookie, we somehow managed to use a technique where we only covered the top of half the cookies. Basically, from the top, the cookies look perfect but from the bottom, they look like a disaster mess. But we managed to eek out enough chocolate to dip all but three cookies so mission: accomplished.

We're in the home stretch! And starving because we've only eaten a bagel all day. We once again called upon our fetching hero to fetch us some lunch/dinner at the grilled cheese restaurant. And we got going on the palmiers. Which we never should leave to last because they take FOREVER. Fortunately, I have a ton of baking pans so we could cut almost all the cookies and place them on pans to be ready to bake. At this point, there was pan overflow into my living room. Things are a bit of a blur here because I think we were also piping the ginger cookies at the same time. My friend was piping the red berries and I was piping the holly leaves. On the floor. We quickly discovered a need for pillows under our knees but it was rather uncomfortable regardless. Naturally, I didn't have piping bags large enough for all of the chocolate I needed so once the bags got refilled, our hands were covered in red and green chocolate. It took forever. My hands cramped. But I do have to say, the effort was worth it because these cookies were adorable and delicious.

Note the trays of uncooked palmiers in the foreground. Palmiers continued their endless baking while we cleaned up the kitchen and packed up the cookies. Here's a photo of the stuffed dining room table with tasty cookies:

Ok, really that's about 2/3 of the cookies because you may recall, they just didn't all fit. And our final cookie tally this year was a whopping 667. Not our record but not half bad either for one day of baking. Here's our very scientific tracking system:

Whew! All the cookies came out great and we definitely have our confidence back! Guess we'll have to do something crazy for next year, right?

Merry Meringues

Guys, I used the WRONG walnut ball recipe! Brown sugar! My recipe lacked brown sugar!

(Ok, so this is in reference to my last post with the crumbling walnut balls. But I just needed to share my discovery of the truth!)

Moving on to this baking adventure! Just a quick post from a baking adventure last week. I had to bake cookies for a holiday party at work. I didn't have much time to do so and I also didn't want to do anything boring. I'm guessing you know what that means? Something completely crazy!

I decided on meringue cookies. I've made these a few times in the past with varying success. BUT! To spice things up and keep it interesting, I saw a recipe online for "merry meringues" which are striped like peppermints! I just had to try it.

I went back to the America's Test Kitchen meringue recipe because it is just the best and I'm positive always gives me the best results. And I love making meringues because they have so few ingredients. Just egg whites, cream of tartar, a pinch of salt, sugar, and vanilla. Making the meringues was so easy. To achieve the striped effect, I was directed to paint colored stripes on the inside of my piping bag. I opted for only 4 stripes of red to test it out. I think this would have worked better with non-plastic bags because I felt like I had trouble with the dye rolling around a bit but overall, I ended up with 4 thin red stripes in my bag.

Then I had to VERY CAREFULLY spoon the meringue into the piping bag without smudging the stripes. It helped that I was working with a gigantic piping bag. So I started piping and the first five or so came out completely white. Not a disaster because hey, they're still going to be yummy meringue cookies. After that though, I actually got the desired effect! I think next time I'll either add more stripes, make them thicker, or pipe while turning to get a spiral but regardless, I really loved how they turned out!

How cute are they?!? I tried to fit as many as possible on the two pans because I wasn't making two batches and actually ended up throwing out a bit of meringue. It was a travesty. I baked them for the appropriate amount of time then let them cool in the oven. When I finally took them out, they popped right off the pans perfectly. And when I bit into one, it was absolute perfection. It was just the right amount of airy goodness - little pillows of perfection. These are probably the most perfect meringues I ever made. Success! I brought them to the party and they were enjoyed by all. I got quite a few compliments on these. See? I can still bake! Ignore that last blog post! Hopefully more tales of holiday baking to come! Especially now that I know the correct walnut ball recipe!

The One Where the Baker Gets Burned (Literally and Figuratively!)

Welcome to the very special holiday edition of this blog! As you may know, at the holidays, there is a lot of baking that goes on but there is one yearly tradition that is an exercise in excess. That's right, the yearly baking with my dear friend where we do crazy things like make over 800 cookies in a single day! It's crazy! It's fun! It's festive! It's exhausting! It's successful! Well, normally, it's successful. This year...it was not. Fasten your seatbelts. It's going to be a bumpy ride...

This year, we were shooting for 1000 cookies. We say cookies but really that includes truffles and pieces of fudge as well. It was a lofty goal and we weren't going to be disappointed if we didn't hit it but dammit, we were going to try. And it was definitely attainable! After all, we had a plan! So here's our initial list of what we were going to make:
1) Cookie press cookies (quadruple batch)
2) Palmiers (double batch - makes a lot of cookies per batch)
3) Walnut balls (quadruple batch)
4) Hot chocolate cookies (double batch)
5) Penguin cookies (a late addition because we didn't have enough cookie types)
6) Chocolate truffles (white chocolate and regular)
7) Fudge (3 types)

It's a lot but totally doable. Plus we started baking earlier this year! We took out the puff pastry for the palmiers for it to defrost (yay thinking ahead!) and then we kicked it off with the cookie press cookies. A quadruple batch is more than my mixer can handle so we did two double batches. We settled on trees (obviously), snowflakes, wreaths, and teddy bears. Making the dough was easy. Coloring the dough was even pretty easy. We had our looming suspicions that the color combinations that the food dye package suggested wouldn't work but they did. We also had to use a hand mixer to color two of the batches because we didn't want to clean the KitchenAid four times that early in the day and it was a challenge but we got it done. I love cookie press cookies because you can make so many of them so fast. I also love that I have at least six baking pans so we could press all of the cookies and bake two trays at a time. Within about two hours, we already had 365 cookies. Well, 364 if you don't count the teddy bear cookie that got excluded because it somehow turned pornographic. And no, I don't have a picture of him but suffice it to say, he would be inappropriate to serve to children.

Promising start, no? Next up, we did the first step of the hot chocolate cookies. These cookies are a new one and are part of the "we're so crazy" lineup. Basically, they're sugar cookies baked into a cup shape that you fill with ganache, add super mini marshmallows to, add a pretzel handle and voila! A cup of hot chocolate! You're already shaking your head at me, aren't you? Stop shaking your head, it wasn't even close to the biggest disaster of the day. We used Pillsbury sugar cookie dough as directed (read: because we're lazy) and greased our mini muffin tins. There was some debate over whether we should roll the dough in sugar to help the cookies release from the muffin tin. It was a late addition to the recipe and as my friend pointed out, "If they had to update the recipe, it's probably an important optional step." Good point. So we pressed the dough into the muffin tins so that they looked like adorable little cups and tossed them in the oven. We used the cook time to clean up a bit (look how efficient we are!) and then checked the oven. They did not look done. At all. And a bunch of them rose so they just looked like mini muffins. Noooooooo. We had just finished discussing that worst case scenario, we'd cut out the middles and then when we checked back, they had collapsed again. Oooookay. Disaster averted? They definitely needed extra baking time but finally they started to look browned and done so we took them out of the oven. Let cool completely in pans. Seems like a good time to go get coffee, lunch, and more baking ingredients!

Fast forward to about an hour later where we've already decided on only two types of fudge but to just add nuts to one of them and where we discovered that Dollar Tree was completely out of truffle and cookie tins. Despite these setbacks, we're still feeling good. We checked on our now-cooled hot chocolate cookie cups and well, a chisel wouldn't have released them from the pans. After staring at them for a bit, we decided to try putting them back in the oven to soften them. Miracle of miracles! It worked! It's like we're real bakers with knowledge or something! At this point, we're already patting ourselves on the back for how well we're doing. Fools. We lost about nine of the cookies because the bottoms stuck to the pan too much but overall, we had some adorable little hot chocolate cups. We put them aside to fill later and moved on to the palmiers.

I was smart this year and looked at last year's blog post to see if I had any palmier tips. I did and the tip was "only one pan at a time". The problem with palmiers is that, even though they're only two ingredients, they take forever to bake all the batches and require sustained attention. This year though, we quickly remembered how to fold the cookies properly, were again amazed at the FOUR CUPS of sugar we used on these cookies, and we remembered that while we're doing these cookies, we can actually get a lot of other things done too. So while my friend did the Oreo fudge (I can't report on this at all because I definitely didn't touch any part of it), I manned the palmiers. Here's what I forget every year: they're a pain to flip over and to get off the pan because the sticky sugar gets all over the spatula. So what I end up doing every year is forgoing the spatula and just use my fingers. This is easier when I have long nails (I do not at this moment) but after a few seconds of letting them cool, they are cool enough for a very fast flip. This works great and I made it halfway through the batches (out of, I swear at least 12 batches) before I got distracted by talking or thinking or something shiny and didn't wait any time before touching the cookies. Bam, burn. I feel like a baby because it's so small but let me tell you, a sugar burn on the tip of your right index finger is obnoxious and painful.

It all goes downhill from here.

I truly mark that as the moment where everything that was going so very smoothly just went to hell in a handbasket. Because after this point, nothing at all went right.

Let's return to our heroes who are still baking palmiers, shall we? Once the Oreo fudge was done, we started working on the ganaches for the truffles. I measured out a combo of unsweetened and bittersweet chocolate for the regular truffles and heated up the heavy cream to melt the chocolate. Then I did the exact same thing for the white chocolate. Let me re-emphasize this: I did the EXACT same thing for the white chocolate. I did notice that the white chocolate melted chocolate seemed a bit more liquid than the regular chocolate but didn't think much of it because white chocolate has behaved oddly in the past. Anyway, they both went into the fridge to chill. Then we made the ganache for filling the hot chocolate cups. It was basically the exact same process except actually hot cocoa mix gets added as well. This was actually uneventful and we filled our hot chocolate cups with ganache pretty easily. We also added the super mini marshmallows (they're called marshmallow bits and they're actually stocked by the hot chocolate, oddly enough) and these little guys looked adorable. The last step was to add the pretzel handles but we needed to wait for the ganache to harden first. So off to the side they go again.

And now the fudge. Bear in mind, we are still rotating pans and pans of palmiers at this point. I very stupidly picked a Martha recipe for the fudge. I'm sure it makes excellent fudge but it's very complicated and involves a candy thermometer and let's just say the Oreo fudge did not. Oh yeah, and we doubled the recipe. We actually discussed in advance which would be a bigger regret: doubling the recipe or not doubling the recipe and risking not having enough fudge. So we doubled. Mistake. We thought we were being smart - when it said things like "use a medium saucepan" we used my big pasta pot and thought that would suffice. It did not. Somewhere in the heating cream, melting chocolate stage (during which time we almost forgot to put in half of the chocolate!), the pot got very very close to boiling over. And we were supposed to let this boil to soft ball stage. The problem was, the chocolate was rising above where my candy thermometer temperature line was. And there was nowhere left for this mixture to go! I think we finally called it when we were two degrees below soft ball stage. We really didn't want to clean boiled-over fudge off the stovetop. So we hoped it had cooked enough and put it into a giant metal bowl. Then Martha directed me to add the pieces of chilled butter to the top of the mixture to let melt. The butter was a little less chilled than I would have liked because it was so so hot in the kitchen at this point. We don't normally bake on a day that's almost 60 degrees! Anyway, time to let the fudge cool down for an hour to 112-118 degrees (yes, seriously) and time to take a short break and watch Home Alone. I'd like to point out, the movie had been playing in the background for hours and we technically sat down to watch it the third time when we finally took a break.

Whew. Pain...setting...in..... Sustenance....needed....

We used this time to keep pulling the never-ending pans of palmiers and to assess the situation. Cookie press cookies: done. Palmiers: will never be done, but done. Oreo fudge: done. Chocolate fudge: cooling. Truffles: cooling. Hot chocolate cookies: drying. Walnut balls: not even started. Penguin cookies: abandoned. But fear not! Our cookie total isn't looking sad because I had forgotten that I bought holiday chocolate chips (they're just red and green but they're too cute. How could I NOT buy them??) and my friend found them so we decided to whip up a quick batch of Nestle Toll House cookies for good measure. So, after assessing how screwed we were, we ordered pizza, bid Kevin and the Wet Bandits goodbye and got back to work.

My friend took the chocolate chip cookies and I took the walnut balls. At first we were reluctant to tie up the mixer because we'd need it again for the fudge but when I checked the temperature of the fudge, it was still at about 180 degrees. And the bowl was still piping hot to the touch. Hmm. I won't say much about the chocolate chip cookies because they're easy and they looked great and that was cool. I will, however, tell you very carefully about the walnut ball process. If you recall, the plan was to quadruple the recipe. That would require 6 cups of walnuts. But alas, I didn't have enough walnuts! Or maybe I did but couldn't find them but we were also worried that it wouldn't all fit in the Cuisinart so we downgraded to tripling. So if a quadruple batch needs 6 cups, then a triple batch needs 4 cups, obviously. Oh, you math nerds are telling me that's wrong? Well, you're right, it is wrong. I forgot a half a cup of walnuts. Ooops. As this unfolds, you tell me if you think that was the fatal flaw. Then I added 3 cups of flour, 6 tablespoons of sugar, and 3.5 teaspoons of vanilla (ok, it was supposed to be 3 teaspoons but I forgot that we were tripling and not quadrupling momentarily). Finally, I added the three sticks of butter and the dough looked exactly right. It felt exactly right. I had to leave it in the mixer for a bit to attend to some other things but walnut balls are so easy, how could I get them wrong?

I stepped away from the walnut balls to roll my chocolate truffles which were now ready. We did not double the chocolate truffles because we also had the white chocolate truffles. So I rolled out the truffles, covered my hands in chocolate, and started getting worried that we wouldn't have enough. At this point, our truffle tins were looking like they would be 3 pieces of fudge and 7 truffles (mixture of white and regular). We figured that worst case scenario, we could double up on each of the fudges. I'll spoil it a little...this was not the worst case scenario in the end. It was worse.

After rolling the chocolate truffles, I checked on the white chocolate and it was still liquid. Didn't seem to be thickening at all. And we were running out of time. So I put it in the freezer. Meanwhile, the chocolate fudge was still way too hot. We moved it to a different room and hoped it would eventually cool off. All that done, we decided to circle back and finish our hot chocolate cups. All that was left was to melt white chocolate and break off pretzel pieces to make adorable handles. Except I bought the wrong pretzels. Something we noticed AFTER melting all the white chocolate. Ughhhhh. So I called my dear husband to see if he could pick up the correct (smaller) pretzels on his way home.

Tired yet?

We rested our weary feet and sat in front of the TV rolling the walnut balls. We were careful not to make them too big and we did a very nice job on consistent sizing and they looked great. Tossed them in the oven at 300 degrees for 35 minutes and cleaned up a bit before the pizza finally arrived. So we had an actual break! And we got to see Kevin booby trap his house!

Our break sadly ended when the walnut balls were done. We had made a note last year to sift the powdered sugar so it would be less lumpy and we sifted two bowls of sugar so we could both roll the walnut balls in powdered sugar before they cooled. At this point, we were completely out of counter space and were planning to sit on the floor to roll the walnut balls. We pulled the walnut balls out of the oven, waited a minutes, and then tried to pick them up. And couldn't without them crumbling. So we panicked. Were they not cool enough? Were they not cooked enough? We didn't think they looked as browned as usual and we were making a lot so we put them back in the oven for another few minutes. In the meantime, we started prepping truffle coatings. At this point, we realized our frozen attempt at white chocolate truffles was still liquid and unlikely to change. So we set about rolling our sad number of truffles in walnuts and covering them in red and green chocolate. Or at least that was the plan until "Oh wait! The fudge!" It was now finally cool enough to put back in the mixer where I was instructed to mix it until it started to hold its shape, about 3-8 minutes. About 16 minutes later, I was afraid my KitchenAid was going to overheat. No luck, still liquid. It was thickening but I'm pretty sure we were done for. We mixed pecans into half of it, tossed it into pans, and put it in the fridge and hoped for the best.

We didn't get the best.

The fudge never fudged. It's still in my fridge and is surprisingly soft (though maybe is cut-able now, days later). I bet if you went at it with a spoon it'd be delicious. But there was no way that fudge was making the truffle tin cut. So for those keeping score, we're now at one type of fudge and one type of truffle for our truffle tins. The ones rolled in walnuts were fine. The ones dipped in green were fine(ish). The ones dipped in red were fine until the last one where we ran out of melted red chocolate to dip, had to melt some more but the chocolate wouldn't melt to a dippable consistency, got a fresh bowl of red chocolate, tried to make that last one look nice, and promptly gave up. Meanwhile, I was too sad to dispose of all of the white chocolate ganache and it was a really nice piping consistency so I filled a piping bag with it and made beautiful designs on some of the truffles. At least they were beautiful for about 5 seconds after I piped them and then the white chocolate would just sort of roll off the truffle. I thought I was going crazy. I would look at ones that I swore were piped well and they looked bad so I would repipe them. Finally, my friend informed me that I wasn't losing my mind, the truffles were just losing their white chocolate. This whole fiasco ended with my friend saying "that last red truffle looks pretty bad" and me saying "who are we kidding? ALL of these truffles look pretty bad!" and the two of us literally falling on the kitchen floor laugh/crying.

But it's not over yet! Don't forget, there are still walnut balls to handle. Or rather, to not handle. Because picking them up was like picking up a ball of sand on the beach. The lightest pressure and it would just crumble into a billion pieces. We managed to roll maybe 4 of them before we just gave up. We tried googling this walnut ball issue to see what went wrong. We quadruple checked the ingredients I added and while mistakes were made, that didn't feel like the problem. Our working theory is that the kitchen was warmer than it's ever been when we were baking and baking is a fickle thing. But regardless of how it happened, we are heart broken. Everybody loves the walnut balls. I love the walnut balls. But we have no walnut balls to give. Four cups of walnuts gone to waste. We had even sifted powdered sugar! And we never sift! Wasted sifting! I tried to think of ways to use the crumbled walnut balls but my brain was way too fried after nearly 12 hours of baking. My friend asked if they at least tasted good aside from the texture. I popped one in my mouth and nearly choked. It was impossible to separate the taste from the texture because the second it hit my mouth, it just crumbled and dried out my entire mouth. And so, garbage. We called my husband and told him to forget about the pretzels because we were DONE. We had the bitter taste of failure and a whole kitchen to clean up. It was so disappointing because we started out so strong and then the hits just kept on coming.

We sadly boxed up our cookies and truffles and fudge but it was half-hearted at most. I was counting on a lot of gifting of cookies and truffles but was just so embarrassed by the truffle tins that I may not gift them at all. The cookies at least make a presentable tin though there is a pretty heavy emphasis on cookie press cookies. We didn't even continue counting our cookies. We definitely hit over 500 but the number target just wasn't important in the end. Sigh. I guess after so many successful baking endeavors we had to have a failure. Just wish it wasn't at Christmas.

Next year, it's Back To Basics 2017. No truffles, no fudge, no cookie recipes we haven't tried before (well, maybe just one or two). Like a phoenix, we shall rise from the ashes of failure to emerge even more triumphant than ever before. Also, 2016 sucks.

Looking on the bright side, the cookies that we did make look lovely. Take a look and see for yourself.

The cookies:

The truffles:

The truffles do look very nice in the tin though. Somehow that makes it a bit better. 

The failed walnut balls: (And yes, I did Hulk smash the entire pan of cookies in my sadness and rage.)

 

I almost forgot the best part! While we were tinning up the cookies, I pulled out a tin and put it on the table. Minutes later, I said, "Oh wait, we already filled this tin." To which my friend replied, "No, we didn't...." That's right, my friends. I found in my kitchen a half-empty tin of LAST YEAR'S CHRISTMAS COOKIES. They looked surprisingly not-disgusting but I'm still alarmed that I found that. Must keep better tabs on my cookie tins this year. I consider it a sign though. It's like the universe is reminding me that we can be good at this and we will one day succeed again.

Don't worry, I will have more successful upbeat blog posts before we actually hit Christmas. In fact, I made some remarkably perfect meringue cookies that I'll tell you all about soon. In the meantime....FA LA LA LA LA FA LA LA FAIL!

Foiled Again!

Why would I make a simple Christmas dessert? Moreover, why would I make two simple Christmas desserts? Simple is way overrated. What better way to celebrate the holidays than with Christmas Tree Brownies and a festively decorated cheesecake? Now I know that Christmas was almost a month ago but since my Christmas tree and decorations are still up, this post totally qualifies as being part of the Christmas season. Onward!

My first mission: Christmas tree brownies for Christmas eve. I was a bit short of time so I decided to go with a boxed brownie mix. Because ya know, that's easy. WRONG. This little box of Duncan Hines almost defeated me. First, I opted for fudgy brownies instead of cakey brownies so that they'd be easier to cut. Then I had to add the egg, water, and vegetable oil. Three ingredients. Just three. How hard is that? As I was stirring my mixture, it seemed really thin and grainy. As if there were way too little to fit in my pan. My solution was to whisk harder to try to make it less grainy. I even triple-checked the box to make sure I had gotten all of the quantities correct. But I had so I said to myself "well, I don't make boxed brownies very often. Maybe the fudgy kind is just really thin?"

So I went about preparing my pan. In my narcissistic re-read of my own past blog posts, I remembered the tin foil sling trick for brownies. This is the trick where you place tin foil one direction across the pan and place another sheet the other direction so that when the baking is done you can just lift the brownies out of the pan and slice them without a mess. This has worked well in the past and seemed critical for cutting Christmas tree-shaped brownies. I made the sling and I Pam-ed the pan and poured my brownie mix into the pan. It barely reached the edges of the pan. I was starting to get a little distressed. I thought for sure these brownies would burn to a crisp! There just wasn't enough batter! I quadruple-checked the pan size at this point (just to be extra sure) and lo and behold, that was correct too! What was going on???

Finally, I threw up my hands, said "if they burn, they burn", and went about cleaning the bowl while the oven preheated. As I was filling the bowl with water, I looked on the counter and sitting there MOCKING me was the measuring cup filled with the vegetable oil. That's right, I measured the vegetable oil but did not add it. Idiot. Now I have a wet bowl, a measuring cup of oil, and a tin-foil sling-ed pan filled with incomplete brownie batter. [Damn, I'm very annoyed because I had written the ENTIRE blog post but for some bizarre reason, it only saved to this point! Let's see how fast I can rewrite it!] Hokay. So. Picture (if you dare) the comical image of the baker picking up the foil sling and ever so slowly letting the batter run from the foil back to the bowl. And then trying to scrape the remaining batter off the foil with a spatula without ripping it because I am just way too lazy to redo the foil slinging process that takes approximately three seconds. Blasphemy! On the bright side, the batter looked much more like brownie batter after I added the oil.

Into the oven, demon brownies.

I'm always amazed at how well the foil sling works. After the brownies cooled, I flipped the whole thing onto a cutting board with no issues at all. It was magical. Then it was time for the cutting and decorating. For those of you who don't know, a Christmas tree brownie consists of a triangle-shaped brownie with a broken candy cane stem, green icing piped in squiggles, sugar ball ornaments, and a sugar star. Did I mention they're small? So this was the sort of tedium that calls for reinforcements. At this point, I had my sister breaking off the curved parts of the mini candy canes, my mom piping the green icing (after I tried and failed to figure out how to work the bizarre piping tip), and me leading the charge of applying the tiny ornaments and stars. Tedious but adorable! Look how cute they are!

They tasted pretty good too, once I scraped all of the decorations off. I can't help it! I'm a brownie purist! Anyway, these were super easy to make if you're not an idiot, and were very festive and beloved by all.

So that took care of Christmas eve dessert. Now to prepare Christmas day dessert! This was my typical exercise in declining expectations. I started out planning to make a peppermint chocolate cheesecake. Then my mom said she didn't want peppermint. Ooooook, I'll downgrade to a regular cheesecake with a chocolate ganache, festively decorated. Oh wait, my mom doesn't want chocolate ganache either. FINE. How about a chocolate graham cracker crust on a standard cheesecake? Nope. Apparently we're on a chocolate hiatus. So we landed on a regular good ol' fashioned cheesecake decorated with mini candy canes (because I already had them) and peppermint bark (as an homage to my original plan).

There's nothing too interesting about making a cheesecake at this point. The only interesting thing was that I was a little bit lazy and procrastinate-y so I was frantically trying to finish baking said cheesecake while also preparing to go to Christmas eve dinner. I kinda forgot how long cheesecakes take to cook. There was also a bit of an incident where the oven decided to say it was preheating and was stuck on a low heat for an abnormally long time. I had to reset the oven halfway through baking. Also, the last step of the recipe involved letting the cake cool in the oven with the door open for 30 minutes before removing. By the time I reached that step, it was time to leave. So I just left the cake in the oven with the door open and called it a day until we got back home. There's a chance it was overbaked. It was a bit denser than usual so who knows?

On to decorating! I planned to press the mini candy canes around the edge of the cheesecake but they would. not. stick. And I didn't feel like destroying my cheesecake. So I just poked them in the top in a circle. And then the middle had very artistically broken pieces of extra artistic peppermint bark. It should be in MOMA. Or maybe you could just judge for yourself:

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering: if you intend to decorate your cheesecake with mini candy canes and then you plan to refrigerate it for several hours before serving, you just might end up with the candy canes bleeding red and white whatever candy canes are made of all over the cake and turning into a sticky mess. Not like I'd know about that or anything. Anyway, Merry (belated) Christmas (but it's still January so close enough!) So ends another holiday baking adventure.

A Disney Moment: The Princess and the Frog

Oh thank goodness for good movies! It's like coming up for air! I saw this movie in theaters when it came out (as an adult with my friend who is also an adult) and I unashamedly cried in the theater. For those of you who don't know, this was the first movie in a looooooong time to bring back the hand drawn animation. And I love it.

And then there's the music which is so fun. And the villain song which is creepy but fun but also smart (something that's been lacking for a while). And the horrifying death of a main character. And a princess that has a can-do spirit! And and and...well, I gush. To me, it's just really beautiful. If I have to go ahead and pick a favorite part though, I've gotta go with the relationship between Tiana and her friend (forgetting the name at the moment). There's something that feels so beautiful about it in the way that it transcends race and class at rare moments. Idealistic, maybe but lovely nonetheless. And did I mention the music? I thought the score was just so original. Especially Almost There.

Gonna stop gushing now and just say that it's 1/5 in this group. And up near the top of our list.

I Hate this Pastry Bag

This adventure is brought to you by running out of cookies to bring to a Christmas party. Yes, seriously. After divvying up the many cookies, I realized that I didn't have quite enough to bring to a Christmas party. The obvious solution? Make a croquembouche, of course! The idea for this dessert came from two places: first, it was one of the challenges on Master Chef Junior and I figured that if children could do it, I surely could as well and second, my mom got a lovely dessert stand as a gift that honestly looks like it is meant to hold a croquembouche (and nothing else).

What is a croquembouche, you ask? Well, friends, it's a tower of cream puffs held together with caramel and decorated with spun caramel. It's just a lovely and festive dessert. And, conveniently enough, my mom was going to help me bake it! She's so nice. The plan was for me to make the cream puff shells the day before in CT and bring them to NJ for filling and assembly. Long story short: I didn't. No excuses here, just didn't do it. So I got to NJ around 2:00 needing to make the shells, the cream (which has to chill for 2 hours), the caramel, and then assemble everything by 7:00. No pressure, right? Oh, and if you're wondering why I got such a late start, it's because I saw Star Wars at 8:30 am. No regrets - we only paid $14 for 2 tickets.

So, it's possible that when I arrived, my mom got a bit frustrated with me for not telling her that I didn't make the shells but hey, that makes things more interesting, right? We were racing against the clock! We got to work on the pastry cream first since that needed to chill for 2 hours. And by "we" I definitely mean my mom. I'm not sure I did anything with that pastry cream except hand my mom ingredients and bowls and read the directions out loud. But my track record with custard is not the best so I was happy to cede control to my mom. Eventually, the custard started custard-ing and looked very nice so into the fridge it went. We did taste a bit before chilling and it seemed awfully sweet. Oh, I should mention that the recipe called for a really really tall croquembouche and we weren't doing that so we halved the recipe. Dividing by 2 is hard! At one point, we had to figure out the conversion for 1/3 cup to tablespoons because we don't have a 1/6 cup measure. If memory serves, it was 3 tbsp + 1 tsp so dividing by 2 made it 1.5 tbsp + 1/2 tsp. It was a lot of math and a lot of looking for the right measuring instruments. 

Custard in the fridge, time to go buy a Christmas tree! Yes, in the middle of baking, we had to go get a Christmas tree and carry it in and set it up. While I was putting water in the tree stand, my mom basically finished the dough for the pastry shells. I'm not sure I baked any of this dessert. Hmm. Anyway, I took charge of setting up the pastry bag. I hate this pastry bag. There's no other way to say it. It's the worst. It's a slippery, stiff, plastic-y bag that is hard to work with and always makes a mess. Also, I spent at least 5 minutes trying to put the piping tip on which was IMPOSSIBLE. At one point the tip flew across the kitchen. Turns out it didn't fit because it isn't for that pastry bag. Oops. Perhaps that one was user error. But the problem was that we didn't have a large plain tip for piping so we needed to use the large star tip. After a row of piping though, I figure out how to make smooth mounds and it started working out much better. Naturally, I couldn't fit all of the dough in the bag so there was a harrowing refilling process that made a huge mess. Meanwhile as I was piping, my mom was following to brush the puffs with egg wash and smooth out the spikes and scold me for piping them too close together. Joke's on you, mom, they puffed up just fine! 

Beautiful golden brown puffs. Lovely. 

Now it's time to fill the puffs! We were supposed to poke a hole, then fill the center with the cream. The problem is, piping with this bag one-handed is impossible. I had to hold the puff in one hand and pipe with the other and let's just say, it was all coming out the top. And I was getting in trouble for not filling them enough. Eventually I got the hang of that at least but my hands were shaking, my mom was telling me I was doing it wrong, and the greasy bag was just a mess. So my mom took the bag away volunteered to fill the rest. Oh, imagine that, she's having just as much trouble as I did! After a lot of laughing and calling her a smartass for thinking she could do it better, we developed a system where I held the puff while she piped two-handed. It got much easier. Our technique leaves something to be desired but we got it done. 

And then abandonment. My mom had to leave for a dinner and movie and I was left to make the caramel and assemble the whole thing. The caramel was just boiling sugar and water until it turned golden brown and my mom warned me that it can turn on a dime so I was watching very carefully. And watching. And watching. It took at least 10 minutes. I probably could have taken a walk. I also prepared an ice bath to put the pot in as directed to get it to stop cooking immediately once it hit the right color. Eventually, it started to turn brown. It seemed a little light but I noticed the sides were smoking a bit so I put it in the ice bath to be on the safe side. After a quick hiss, the bubbles cleared and behold! Lovely lovely golden brown caramel.

Now to assemble. I had to dip the sides of the puffs in the caramel and place them in a ring to form the base. On the second puff, I just barely nicked the tip of my finger in the caramel. Caramel burns hurt! It wasn't the end of the world but I do have a tiny caramel blister on my finger still. Meanwhile, the caramel is still in the ice bath and is now audibly cracking and hardening very very quickly. By the third puff, it was impossible to dip in the caramel because it was so hard. But, I used my brain (for once) and tossed the pot back on low heat to warm up the caramel and after a few minutes and some stirring, it was the perfect consistency again. I ended up repeating this process several times but it worked well. I stacked up the puffs and I am REALLY proud of how it turned out. Nice and symmetric and I even added some spun caramel as decoration, basically accomplished by using the spoon to drizzle caramel on but it worked great. Apparently I was supposed to use a fork or a broken whisk (a broken whisk? Who saves a broken whisk? Seriously?) but the spoon worked just fine. It probably helped that the caramel was slightly cool. Anyway, it's not as tall and fancy as many croquembouches but I love it just the same. 

I actually made a second one (not pictured) because I had so many leftover puffs. It wasn't quite as tall as the first but was pretty easy to replicate. Not sure why the Master Chef Junior children had such problems with it. Oh, and as for the taste, apparently the pastry shells cut the sweetness of the cream and people liked them. I don't actually eat cream puffs so I wouldn't know. But so pretty! Oh, and I finished the whole thing with an hour to spare. 

I think I need a bigger challenge for the next one. What do you think?

A Disney Moment: Home on the Range

Whoops, apparently I jumped the gun on leaving the last group of five. And nobody even corrected me! Shameful. Although, I can't blame you, dear readers, because Home on the Range is a solid middle of the pack movie and ranked a 3/5 according to my notes. I actually liked this one better than I thought I would because there were a lot of pretty funny background jokes that were going on and overall, it was not taking itself too seriously. But OMG, the yodeling song! This might be the trippiest scene since pink elephants! There are psychedelic cows! The colors! I remember being unable to stop laughing the first time I saw it. You can see it here if you haven't seen it before. It's worth it. I don't really remember the rest but oh boy, that yodeling. 

A Disney Moment: Chicken Little

Apparently my notes were not as good as I thought they were. I'm writing this now but I saw this movie well over a year ago. This group of five includes Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Princess and the Frog, and Tangled. Two of these are clearly better than the other three. But I don't really remember the first three! I asked my sister to remind me and we determined that Chicken Little ranked a 3/5. Then I asked her why and apparently there was an actual bull in a china shop that I couldn't stop laughing at. So hang on, let me Wikipedia this movie to jog my memory....

Aha! Apparently just seeing the picture of Chicken Little jogged my memory! I loved his huge glasses! And he has the ugly duckling friend! The whole beginning of this movie had such charm! And then...aliens? Ok, things got a little weird at that point and I don't entirely remember so I won't comment. By the way, the Wikipedia entry for this movie was clearly written by an eight year old. So, umm, middle of the road movie but overall not too bad. Maybe I'll watch it again some day and try to figure out what happens in it. 

Go Big or Go Home: A Return to Blogging with 845 Cookies

Well, folks, if I'm going to come back, I'm obviously going to come back in a big way. Yes! this blog has been stagnant for over a year and yes! there has been much less baking than in years past but the siren call of my KitchenAid mixer has finally convinced me to dive headfirst back into the insanity. Contributing to this insanity is my good friend and Christmas baking partner. We've developed this new holiday tradition of baking together at Christmas. This is the third year of our tradition and last year (which I sadly failed to blog about), we made 517 cookies in one day. We counted because we're nerds. It goes without saying that we needed to surpass last year's total this year. We also didn't want to just make cookies this year and decided to expand our baking list to include truffles because who doesn't love truffles? So, on a lovely Sunday afternoon we were off to the races!

Here was our plan: Ok, we kind of didn't have a plan. Last year we had decided on what we were going to bake and strategized the order of the baking and everything. This year our strategy was more in the tone of "Hey, we should bake cookies." So we spent the first hour of our baking time developing a plan. Here was our original plan:

1) Truffles covered in almonds, dark chocolate ganache, white chocolate ganache, Christmas sprinkles, coconut, cocoa
2) Peanut butter truffles covered in dark chocolate ganache and white chocolate ganache
3) Coffee pecan fudge
4) Cookies and cream fudge
5) Palmiers (double batch)
6) M&M cookies (double batch)
7) Reese's peanut butter cup cookies (double batch)
8) Cookie press cookies (snowflakes and trees)
9) Chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips (double batch)
10) Walnut balls (double batch)

That sounds completely reasonable for one day of baking, right? Agreed! Off we went to the kitchen where the first order of business was making the truffles since we would be covering them with so many different things. I love making truffles. It's just heavy cream and chocolate and rolling into a ball. After some very difficult math trying to determine how many truffles should be made for the number of tins that we bought, my friend got to work heating the cream and measuring out the chocolate while I got to work on the base of the M&M cookies. Efficiency! I don't think I've ever talked about the M&M cookies but they're just the regular Nestle Toll House cookies with the chocolate chips cut slightly (which I definitely eyeballed). Then they get baked most of the way until we take them out and add red and green M&Ms in an adorable pattern on the top. And by adorable, I mean completely OCD in that each cookie has six M&Ms (green center, five reds surrounding or vice versa) and obviously the M&Ms must be placed "M" side down. This requires speed, agility, and teamwork to get all of the cookies decorated before the cookies cool down too much. Then, back in the oven for another minute to set the M&Ms and bam! First cookies done!

Well, sort of. Since we made a double batch and we only fit about 12-16 cookies per pan, we were baking these for at least an hour. But that's ok because every time we put a pan in the oven, off we went to do something else! The mixer was occupied so I set about rolling a billion truffles while my friend looked for the spritz cookie recipe. It wasn't actually a billion truffles but the first ones I did were the ones rolled in almonds. Just kidding, because apparently I didn't have almonds! Oh well, walnuts work just as well, right? After a long discussion about the value of toasting nuts before using them, we completely forgot to toast the walnuts and just rolled the truffles in them anyway. Whoops. Oh, have I mentioned how much I love having a food processor? Remember back in the day when I used to chop nuts by smashing a rolling pin into them? This is way better!

Let's see, where was I? Rolling truffles. So I rolled the almond walnut truffles, the coconut truffles (hmm, I'm just now thinking that perhaps I should have toasted the coconut? Is that a thing? I don't actually eat coconut...), and the truffles that were to be covered in dark and white chocolate ganaches. I should also point out that the plan was to have white chocolate drizzle on the dark chocolate truffles and vice versa. Was being the operative word. But wouldn't it have been pretty? By the time I finished the intricate dance of rolling truffles and applying M&Ms and cleaning the chocolate off my hands, my friend had already made the spritz dough and it was definitely time for a glass of sangria.

Devoted readers will remember that I have made spritz cookies before and that I spoke at length of the merits of the Dead Lady Cookie Press. Obviously, I do not have the Dead Lady Cookie Press so I was forced to use a brand new cookie press that I got for my wedding. Well, sort of. Last week, I planned to make spritz cookies for a fundraiser so I opened up my new cookie press and lo and behold, the piece that actually presses the cookies is missing. I was very sad that my fancy electric cookie press was defective so I brought it back to Bed Bath and Beyond where they no longer stock the electric cookie press and I had to get the OXO Good Grips Cookie Press. I was skeptical after the terrible cookie press gun that my mom had failed to press cookies with in the past but let me tell you, I am a convert. This cookie press is SO easy to use! It doesn't hurt your hands, it doesn't slip around, it's easy to load with dough, and it's easy to clean! I know I sound like a commercial for a cookie press but I can't oversell how amazing this cookie press is. Everyone should be so lucky to have this cookie press. I also always love making spritz cookies with people who haven't made them before because it always seems like magic to them to get actual shapes out of those strange metal discs. Anyway, we decided to make the green Christmas trees (because they're the best) and blue snowflakes because they would make our cookie tins look colorful. Simple, beautiful, and baked without incident. Well, except that we forgot to refrigerate the dough before pressing but you know what? I think refrigerating the dough makes it much harder to press! These came out perfectly every time! Bam. More cookies done to add to our total.

At this point, while spritz cookies were baking, my friend magically finished the chocolate cookie dough and was adding the white chocolate chips. I don't even remember her doing any of this but apparently it got done. It was around this time that I realized that we had refrigerated the truffles for wayyyyy too long and now it was hard to pry them from the bowl to roll into balls. I took the bowls out of the fridge but it didn't seem to help much so I muscled my way through the chocolate to roll into balls. It was a fascinating lesson in the science of truffles. The outside of the "dough" was very stiff and hard to get through, but the inside was still creamy and almost wet. Ya know, like a truffle should be! I also learned that no matter how hard the chocolate is, the second I start rolling it in a ball, it gets sticky again and easy to dip in cocoa (which is what I did next).

By now, my dear husband was home and we had prepared a list for him of things he needed to pick up at the store. Also by now, we were realizing that we would need to downgrade at least some of our plans if we wanted to stay sane. So we come to our first compromise: instead of doing white and dark chocolate ganaches, we will just dip in white melted chocolate (Wilton candy melts) and red melted chocolate. How festive! We just needed some red candy melts. Now, I don't want to be too mean because my husband kindly ran this errand for us but I really do have to point out that he texted me a picture of a bag of red candy melts and a bag of dark cocoa candy melts and asked me which one was correct. I don't know how "Wilton red candy melts" on the list could have been clearer in this respect. Also, apparently there were no Christmas sprinkles at the store so my husband picked up red sanding sugar and green sanding sugar. It was a good move and we opted to go with the green since we already would have red truffles.

While we were waiting for our missing ingredients to arrive from Santa, we got to work on the palmiers. We made these last year and they were a big hit and it felt like we didn't make enough last year so we decided to double the recipe. Fun fact: that makes a whole lot of cookies! So many cookies that we ran out of places to put them. We only had enough room to cut one batch in advance and had to wait to cut the rest. But wait, I'm getting ahead of myself! I haven't even told you what these are! Palmiers are puff pastry with sugar rolled in and folded intricately and baked. Sounds pretty easy, right? As always in this blog, if it sounds easy, it surely is not. We had to read the folding directions three or four times and correct the first folding attempt before we got it right, despite having done this before. It's also critical to be careful with the bake time because it's a different amount of time on each side and if you let them go too long, they will burn for sure and burned sugar smells bad. I only burned one batch a little bit but that's because I started to get antsy making just one pan at a time and tossed two pans in at once for one batch. Turns out the bottom pan burns if you do that. After it happened, I vaguely remember that happening last year, hence why I had been doing it one pan at a time. Instinct is an interesting thing. However, now it's documented so that Christmas 2016 Jen won't make the same mistake. Hopefully.

Finally, while the palmiers were baking, we took a break. We were very hungry and thirsty and waiting for our pizza and we needed to continue our annual tradition of watching Home Alone while baking. This year we opted for Home Alone 2 because we didn't finish watching it last year. That movie sure is dated. But I love it all the same. Bear in mind that while we were watching, we were still getting up to remove cookies from the oven at a fairly steady pace. We also used this time to re-discuss our plan and make our second compromise of the night, i.e. there was no way in hell we were making a second version of truffle. Peanut butter truffles were a no-go. We also downgraded the Reese's cookies to a single batch from a double because it was already almost 7 pm and we still had a lot to do. Left on our list at this point was dipping truffles in two types of chocolate, two types of fudge, Reese's cookies, and walnut balls (plus however many palmiers were still left to bake).

After a quick meal, we hauled our already tired and aching bodies off the couch at the approximate point where Kevin is heading to Duncan's toy chest and got back to work. My friend took the cookies and cream fudge and I continued baking the never ending trays of palmiers. Speaking of which, after I put in the last pan of palmiers, my friend played a very mean joke and said "Only one more after that one!" Cruel, cruel joke. I wish I had counted how many batches of palmiers we made because they just went on forever. I also used this time to crush the oreos for the cookies and cream fudge. I was excited to do this with my food processor but I still hadn't cleaned it from chopping walnuts and didn't want to because I still needed to chop more walnuts for the walnut balls. There wasn't time to chop walnuts and then oreos (because apparently fudge is a pretty delicate process that involves moving very quickly once things get going) so I used the old standby: put oreos in a ziplock bag and smack them with a rolling pin. There is something very satisfying about that though. There was something even more satisfying about getting the opportunity to sit on the floor to do it. We were really starting to feel the pain at this point.

There was some intricate teamwork involved with the cookies and cream fudge, especially when we tried to empty a jar of marshmallow fluff into the pot but ultimately we got the fudge in the pan and got the pan in the fridge and set about the next tasks. I took the lead on the second fudge, a nice coffee-pecan fudge. Somehow, this one was more involved than the previous one and involved approximately 20 minutes of constant stirring. While I was doing that, I think my friend was making the walnut ball dough? I don't even know, it all starts to get fuzzy at this point. Anyway, I was very excited to use my candy thermometer for the first time and kept a very close eye to identify exactly when the mixture reached the "soft ball" stage. Then I had to stir in some pecans and put it in the pans. Now, I don't know if we misread the directions or if we were having a collective blonde moment but we definitely should have put it in one pan and not two. It ended up being pretty thin and, in the second pan, didn't even reach the edges. But once it was in the pan, there was no turning back because it was hardening almost instantly. Oh well! Into the fridge you go!

And onto the floor we go to roll out all of the walnut balls. We were completely out of counter space and we were tired of standing and it was definitely past 9:00 at this point. But walnut balls got rave reviews last year! How could we not do them? Strategically, that's why we left them till last. Wait, last....I'm missing something...the peanut butter cup cookies! We also made those sometime between pizza and walnut balls! I literally don't recall how we made that happen. I guess it must have been while I was making fudge? Yes! I remember now, because the muffin tins with the peanut butter cup dough were behind my feet on the floor while I was stirring the fudge! It may have been a bit of a tripping hazard. There were only two pans of those though so I guess they baked quickly. So I suppose that before rolling walnut balls, we were pressing Reese's peanut butter cups into the muffin tins (it's another bake most of the way and add candy recipe) which must mean that at some point, my friend unwrapped all of the peanut butter cups. Hmm. This was only two days ago, I really should remember. We were just getting so tired at this point. And thirsty! It was so weird but we were both so thirsty and we weren't even eating the cookies! We seriously need our heads examined.

Whatever. At some point, we made Reese's cookies and now we're sitting on the floor rolling walnut balls. Despite having very few ingredients, these cookies are delicious. So we rolled them all out on the pans, stuck one in the oven and wait a minute, I missed something else. Sometime before sticking the walnut balls in the oven, we melted the chocolate to dip the remaining truffles in! Let's rewind to that point (whenever it was) and just say that the chocolate melted perfectly in the microwave and we dipped the truffles by sticking a toothpick in each one and spinning it around in the chocolate. In the future, we will be more careful about completely covering the truffles and we will put them on wax paper and not on the pan so they come off easier but in general, this strategy worked well for us. Except for one truffle that looked ugly so we were going to discard it but then we realized that one tin would be a truffle short so we obviously couldn't have that. I actually peeled off cooled chocolate from one of the truffles so that we would have enough of the white truffles to go in the tins. So whew, the last of the truffles are in the fridge chilling and are you tired yet? We are!

Back to balls. We put the walnut balls in the oven and collapsed on the couches to continue watching Home Alone. By the time all of the walnut balls were cooked though, we only got as far as the dramatic music where Kevin starts setting booby traps. Next time we'll need to start the movie earlier. Also, we were rolling the walnut balls in powdered sugar and it worked pretty well but next time, we'll actually sift the powdered sugar first. It was a little bit lumpy. Note for next year!

AND WE'RE DONE! Well, sort of. Done baking. Now we just have to cut a bunch of fudge and actually assemble the tins of cookies and truffles. And ya know, clean up. But look how beautiful they are! And yes, of course we laid the cookies out decoratively on the dining room table for picture taking purposes!

In summary, we made a total of 845 cookies/truffles/pieces of fudge. We started at 1 pm on a Sunday and finished cleaning up at approximately midnight. We are tired. But honestly, it's such a beautiful sight to behold and I feel very accomplished. Next year, I'm thinking that perhaps we don't increase the number like crazy people and instead we focus on better methods of packaging. As it stands, the cookie tins look very nice at first but they are not very stable and the powdered sugar from the walnut balls can make a bit of a mess. We'll definitely be looking for some process improvement there. Overall though, not bad for a day's work. Plus, it was a super fun way to get in the Christmas spirit! Now, who wants a cookie?

A Disney Moment: Treasure Planet
Ok, ok, I know it's been forever. We finished watching all of the Disney animated features well over a year ago and have since moved on to Pixar. But, we did take notes and rank the movies so I'll give you a double feature review until we finish up and give the final rankings! Let's start with Treasure Planet. This is the shocking movie of the group. We settled into watching this with the attitude that we were in for another Atlantis (as a reminder, Atlantis was Black Cauldron bad) but we were pleasantly surprised. It's a pretty underrated movie. We really liked the animation and the creativity of the huge quantities of differently animated aliens. I don't remember much about it except that it was very much in the tone of Muppet Treasure Island (an obvious classic) and we liked that the captain was a woman. Writing it now, it seems pretty forgettable but it was our favorite of the group at the time. Doesn't say much for this group. But we definitely enjoyed this one!

A Disney Moment: Brother Bear
No. There's brothers and bears and my interest in this one ends about there. My sister and I were pretty much yelling at the TV for this one. It felt so long and not much happens and I just did not care. The human animation was reminiscent of Lilo's sister's legs and honestly, were it not for Atlantis, this would be a clear bottom ranking. However, it is saved by the fact that Atlantis might be my least favorite Disney animated film of all time so that earns this movie a 4/5 to close out this grouping. Coming next we have Chicken Little, Meet the Robinsons, Bolt, Princess and the Frog, and Tangled. Finally coming out of the black hole of animated films!

Just Like Martha

Merry Christmas everyone! Ok, so it's a little after Christmas but the blogging has waited until now because I was traveling on Christmas to sunny California. So here I am, blogging from the left coast. In this blog post, I take creativity to a whole new level. Allow me to explain:

For the past ten years, I have thrown a Christmas party with a friend of mine which has gradually morphed into an elaborate and semi-formal dinner party with 41 people. I am allowed to take care of very few things myself in the planning of this party, but one thing I am responsible for is the place settings. And you would be foolish to think I make anything easy and just put placecards at everyone's seats. I have to be more creative than that. So, in honor of my recent baking, I figured I could make cookies to use as place settings. Recall, a few weeks ago, I made Martha Stewart's sugar cookies and she had many precious ideas for decorating cookies for the holidays, including turning the cookies into Christmas ornaments. Aha! A cookie that doubles as a placecard and an ornament! I fail to see how this could go wrong.

So, a couple days before the party, I made up the dough for the cookies. That was pretty easy and there was only one moment of uncertainty. The recipe calls for some brandy. In my house, we have 4 crystal bottles that hold various liquors. I don't know what they are but I knew one was brandy because my mom used it last time we made these cookies. Only she wasn't home to tell me which was which. So, I played a little Russian roulette with the bottles and just guessed and hoped. After all, liquor is liquor, right? I figured, "What's the worst that can happen?" In a bizarre turn of my fortune, I guessed correctly! Then again, apparently I had a 75% chance of guessing correctly because three of the bottles held brandy. But I didn't know that at the time so I declare it still a win.

Anywho, I made the dough and then got distracted so I didn't make the cookies until the next day. The original plan was to cut out the cookies with holes left for ribbon to be tied through to make an ornament and then pipe peoples' names on the cookies with red and green icing. I actually even bought the red and green icing. However, then I thought about it. I thought about how much my hands started cramping when I was piping the happy faces on the snowmen the other day. I thought about how many people have long last names. I thought about the fact that there were going to be 41 place settings to make. I thought that I must be crazy. So then I decided it would be a better idea to get gift tags that you tie onto stuff and write peoples' names on the gift tags. This somehow seemed less crazy to me.

And actually, it was. By the time I was cutting the cookies out, I had my mom and a friend from college helping me out (my sister had staunchly refused to help, deciding that I'm insane and should have just gotten some damn placecards). We picked out the most Christmasy of our cookie cutters so we had toy soldiers, snowmen, gingerbread men, hearts, etc etc. There were at least 10 different types. Martha even told us how to turn the cookies into ornaments. All you have to do is use a straw to poke a hole in the top of the cookie before you bake it. I thought this would be hard because sometimes the cookie dough gets a little sticky but it was actually remarkably easy! A Christmas miracle!

After baking (and yes, burning a few), we picked the best looking cookie ornaments to be the place settings. We got a nice assembly line going with me writing the names on the gift tags (how I obtained the gift tags is a story in and of itself and one I won't get into here but let's just say that I can't see things that are in front of my face) and my mom and friend tying the tags to the ornament/cookies. I was grateful for the helpers because that would have been the most annoying part for me. They all eventually got done and were adorable. Thanks, Martha for giving me the tools for a precious place setting for a dinner party:

The cookies were yummy, they were adorable, and (I'll save you the suspense) people really liked them. I'm not sure if any of the guests kept them as ornaments but several people did eat them before dinner was even served and then used the nametags as, well, nametags and attached them to their dresses, suits, etc. Overall, a success and while it may not be an interesting read, it made me very happy. So there.

Critical Reception:
The critics agree that pressed butter cookies are yummy. I even found someone to agree with me that the green Christmas trees are the yummiest ones. Which makes sense because they are. I ate so many of those cookies, it was insane. I'm a bad sharer when it comes to these cookies. I feel like I should make them a lot more often because they're so delicious.

A Disney Moment: Cinderella
We finally made it! A full length animated feature! And how nice to get back into it with an obvious classic like Cinderella. It was just sheer charm from start to finish. A delight really. I've always loved the "Sing Sweet Nightingale" scene where Cinderella bubbles start harmonizing with each other. I think it was a brilliant and whimsical move to tell much of the story through the mice (especially Gus-gus). The wicked stepmother is wonderfully wicked. I mean, the characters were all perfection.

One delightful moment for me: I never realized that Cinderella didn't know she was dancing with the prince. That was a pretty crucial piece of information for me. I never really thought of Cinderella as being a gold digger or prince-obsessed but it was really sweet to me that she didn't even know that she was with the prince. She just fell in love with this man that she danced with. It's a very endearing story in the end.

I have only one complaint about Cinderella. The scene with the fairy godmother is too long. Honestly, if that scene had been even two minutes shorter, this movie would win in this grouping of five movies. But as it stands, this was an exceptional grouping so Cinderella can only rank a 2/5. It was very very close to number one but it was a really tough decision and I hate labeling any of the movies in this grouping as low as even a 3. Except Ichabod. Which was way sub par compared to the rest of these. Anyway, thumbs up to Cinderella.

A Pressing Christmas Tradition

Happy holidays everyone! I'm absurdly in the Christmas spirit and part of being in the Christmas spirit is making some traditional Christmas cookies like a good Italian should. In my family, we do Christmas cookies lite. By that, I mean that we don't make 18 different types of cookies. However, we do make one type of cookie in three different colors! So that's almost the same thing. The Christmas cookie we make is the spritz (or butter) cookie from the Joy of Cooking. This is one of the few times I'll support using a Joy of Cooking recipe for baking.

For those of you unfamiliar with spritz cookies, they're like a sugar cookie, but you use a cookie press to make fun shapes like trees or ornaments. A little background on the cookie press: years and years ago, my mom had a classic old metal cookie press. Then it broke or disappeared or something. Regardless of the reason, we didn't have a cookie press anymore. So, in order to bring back the tradition, we had to obtain a new cookie press. The problem is, all of these new-fangled cookie presses are plastic and awful. We have two including the Cookie Pro Ultra II Cookie Gun. Sounds impressive but actually was not and led to an angry phone call with the manufacturer last year. The truly epic cookie press battle took place last year but it culminated in us obtaining our current cookie press, affectionately known as "The Dead Lady Cookie Press". That's right, we bought it at an estate sale, where we found it in a pile of crap in the old dead woman's basement. It was almost creepy but we were too excited to have found an old metal screw top cookie press to care. So that's the story behind our cookie press and that's what we use now. (This was a necessary diversion because the cookie press is the most crucial part of making spritz cookies.)

On to the baking! Spritz cookies are actually extremely easy. Cream some butter and sugar, add some egg yolks and vanilla, then add some flour and salt. That's it for ingredients. Then we modify slightly and break the dough into thirds before chilling and dye one third green and one third red (although the red usually comes out more pink than red but I do the best I can). There's nothing exciting to report about any of this except that it's a little annoying because you have to wash everything after using each of the dyes. Then I chucked the dough in the fridge to chill for a few hours.

Here's where things got interesting. Cookie presses come with discs with cutout shapes that you use to create the various shaped cookies. However, the cutouts don't necessarily give you a good indication of what the cookie shape will be. My mom and I identified the tree, the camel (yes, camel.), the IUD/penis shape depending on who you're asking, the butterfly, the spiral, and the blob. So those were the ones we made. There was also a dog/reindeer but we didn't feel like cleaning another one. We started out with the green dough to make the trees because the trees are my favorite. My mom and I were supposed to have another baking minion at this point but he was busy trying to break into his aunt's house with a crowbar. You just can't make this stuff up.

Even with our superior cookie press, pressing the cookies isn't easy. It takes some significant arm strength and the dough has to be just the right temperature. Too cold and you can't press it through the cookie press and too warm and it's a soft mess. Also, if the dough's too cold, the cookies don't stick to the tray and you can't detach the cookies from the press. We stubbornly tried pressing the cookies when they were too cold. These cookies are therefore infused with love and cursing, like all good Christmas cookies.

Eventually we managed to press all of the green dough into trees (though we did have to creatively rebuild a couple). At this point, our baking minion returned to help press some red cookies. The first attempted shape was the spiral shape but that one notoriously doesn't stick to the pan well so we only made a couple of those. I also forgot to take the red dough out of the fridge in a timely manner so the dough was once again too cold. Baking minion tried to warm the dough in the cookie press by wrapping his warm hands around the metal, which seemed like far too a logical solution to me. Finally, we got into a rhythm with the butterfly cookies which turned out to be ornaments(?) as long as they were large enough. Into the oven for about 10 minutes.

All we had left then was the plain dough colored dough. The reason we don't dye this dough is because these are the cookies we add red and green sprinkles to. We started out with the camels but they were hard to make so we only made two camels. Don't worry though, there is a picture of them. It still boggles my mind that a camel shape even exists. For the rest of the cookies we used the IUD/penis shape. However, when pressed through that shape, lo and behold, the cookie was a heart! So we made many heart shaped cookies with red and green sprinkles. Oh, I should also mention that once there is too little dough to go through the cookie press, we made circular cookies with thumbprints in the middle and filled them with sprinkles. I don't particularly care for the sprinkle cookies but I love love love these spritz cookies. Especially the green ones. Because somehow they taste better. Don't argue with me, they're better! Anyway, the cookies are tiny shapes of buttery goodness and they just melt your heart with Christmas joy. Here are some pictures and sorry for the poor quality of the second one (but that's the only way you're getting to see the camels):

Critical Reception:
The truffles are a hit. I've been told that I could make them and sell them for 20 bucks a box and make an awesome profit. I think the favorite type so far has been the cookie encrusted truffle but I haven't asked enough people yet. Plus it's hard to eat more than a few in a day. That said, the truffles are succeeding in bringing Christmas joy and I would definitely make them again with some better white chocolate. And dear readers, you should try it yourself! It's a pretty easy recipe despite the minor roadblocks you read about in my last post. Be brave and get your hands covered in chocolate!

A Disney Moment: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad
So, I spoke too soon. We're not quite at the full length feature films yet. Similar to Fun and Fancy Free, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad is two stories in one movie. First we have Mr. Toad. I don't recall ever having seen Mr. Toad before so my only knowledge of Mr. Toad comes from Mr. Toad's Wild Ride at Disneyland. And that ride can only be described as a hot mess so it doesn't give much insight into the plot. And even after watching it, I'm still not sure what the plot was because it wasn't that memorable. Mr. Toad steals a car because he wants to drive it and goes to jail and then breaks out and somehow ends up with a plane. I just didn't really care. It was entertaining enough while I was watching but it just didn't stick with me.

The second half was the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. The first thing my sister and I noticed was "Ooh! Narrated and performed by Bing Crosby!" We love Bing Crosby and especially his gorgeous singing voice that can just relax you in the best way possible. Unfortunately for us, it worked too well. By about halfway through the introduction of Ichabod (via a slightly lengthy song), I was dead asleep. About five minutes later, my sister was asleep. We both woke up when the movie was pretty much over. Feeling extremely confused, we decided to go to bed and give it another shot the next day.

The next morning we watched Ichabod again. Ichabod as a character is kind of annoying. But that aside, it was really pretty good until the very end. The end has an ambiguity that I didn't care for. I suppose that's Washington Irving's fault but it still annoyed me. Overall, it was better than most (if not all) of the dark times Disney films, but due to the clump of 5 films that Ichabod and Mr. Toad belongs to, it only ranks a 5/5.