Friday, December 07, 2007

Eye Candy Friday

Okay, so I'm not an official participant, but I've been baking up some eye candy this week:




M&M cookies- distraction cookies to keep the hubby out of the "real" ones.


Chocolate chip, extreme close-up


Peanut Butter cookies and Thumbrint cookies


It's Christmas time, which means that it's Cookie Time for me. When I was little, every year around this time I remember coming home and being surprised by a big tray of Christmas cookies made by my grandma. My favorites were the sugar cookies, cut out in Santa faces and frosted with her special handmade frosting. It is delicious. It tastes like confectioner's sugar, but hardens like a royal icing. I've never been able to recreate it, despite numerous attempts. Usually, the frosting is on a white cake we call Sugar Cake, for obvious reasons. The last few years, I've taken over some of the baking responsibilites, and now my little cousins look forward to my cookies for Santa. (Hey, if there's one way to get in with the little kids, passing out cookies is it!). However, I really suck at rolling out cookie dough and decorating cookies like you'll see in the fancy bakeries, so I make due with Wilton's pre-made icing and a kick-ass collection of sprinkles. Hooray for Williams-Sonoma!

Also, we hand out cookies to the various groups I work with at work. We get a few of us together, each bringing in a TON of our own specialty cookies, and make big trays of delicious sugary goodness. So, on top of the normal cookie load (a couple dozen- one to two batches- of about five or six varieties), I'll make about five dozen chocolate chip cookies and probably buy a couple extra boxes of the good store-bought ones for good measure. Everything baked is frozen until needed. Really, a week and a half won't ruin anything. The trays we made last year were HUGE, and a really big success. It's nice to give back to people who work hard all year and don't always get the thanks for it. However, this year participation seems a little low- I hope it picks up again, because the trays are going to be a little sparse.

In other news, I finished a project from a book my sis got me for my birthday! They're cable mittens. I didn't follow the pattern, just used the cable suggested and winged it from there. They turned out great, and I can't wait to wear them:


Elegant-and-Easy Cable Mittens for the Whole Family
Book: 101 Designer One-Skein Projects
Yarn: Patons SWS, 2 balls with half of each used up
Needle: US 4, two at a time top-down
I also made a hat to match, but it turned out too small. Like, it didn't even cover my ears. Ooops. Apparently, I need a new formula for guessing where to start my decreases, since my usual one (this looks long enough, better start my decreases!) isn't working. Sigh.