Gingerbread-mania 01

Recently I have become addicted to marthastewart.com I told myself that I would not support a criminal in her operations but, in my defense, she has some really interesting holiday decorating/cooking ideas. My sisters have been asking me to make gingerbread houses with them. I decided that this year I would attempt that feat. I chose to make my own gingerbread because that store bought stuff is really cardboardy-tasting, and I used the "Gingerbread for Gingerbread House Kit" recipe from martha stewart. The cookie was so rich and delicious... my sisters loved it. They decided to make the traditional gingerbread house, while I chose to make a gingerbread sleigh. I got the house and sleigh templates from verybestkids.com. I had to make many modifications to the recipe but it wasn't difficult at all. I wanted each of my sisters to get a chance to decorate their own house, so I scaled the templates of the houses and sleigh down to make them into individual sizes. And since I didn't need so much gingerbread dough, I halved the recipe. The result... two beautiful mini gingerbread houses, one sleigh and a ton of gingerbread cookies.

Gingerbread-mania 02

Having had so much fun with the gingerbread houses and sleigh, my sisters wanted to continue decorating. So we moved on to the cookies...
As you can see, in the above photo, the cookies were pretty dull and boring to look at. But then voila!
I though that these cookies were adorable... so did my sisters. Cute eh? You would have thought that we were gingerbread cookie professionals. But no... we did make a couple "mistakes" :P some were on purpose and the other were natural. Can you tell which ones?

Whatever the case, we ended up making some really cute ones and all of the cookies (whether pretty or deformed) were equally delicious. I love Christmas don't you... Merry Christmas :)

Stained Glass Window Cookies

I really doubted that I would be able to make these cute little cookies, but they were actually fairly simple to create. I got the recipe from allrecipes.com and just decided to scale the recipe down a bit. I wasn't too sure how they would turn out, so I didn't really want to make a gigantic batch of them. Yet, when they turned out to be delicious I was disappointed that I had made only a small amount... I really should trust myself and allrecipes more! I didn't actually have that much colored, hard-candy lying around the house so I decided to just make a couple of them "stained glass" and got my sisters to decorate the rest with icing sugar.

My little sisters are really getting into baking, I'm glad. Now I won't have to do all the baking on my own, and I'll have my own little sous-chefs to aid me around the kitchen. They actually did a very good job in decorating the cookies... check out our cookies!

Aren't my sister's cookies just adorable (bottom pictures)? I didn't want to eat them... they were so cute. Don't you just love the effects of the 2 colors used for the stained glass ones (top picture)? Hehehe, I was going to make buttons for the gingerbread boy, but there wasn't enough room. It just looks like he was shot through the stomache... same with the bear, so sad :(

Yeah! It's Christmas Time

Wow, have I been waiting so long for this season to really get going. Just last week I got to miss school (... well university) thanks to a huge snow fall. I think the snow went up, past my knees -that's not saying much considering that i'm barely 5 feet- and was about 30cm deep. I was so excited to hear that I'd be missing my bio lab exam (I really needed time to study). The only thing that sucked about the snow storm was that the power went out for about 6 hrs; and during prime time too. I missed Amazing Race, Desperate Housewives and a slew of other awesome shows... but I suppose it was for the best. My family got to hang out a lot more than we usually do, and we played speed pictionary and scrabble. Yup, scrabble, you can tell that I come from a strictly educational family... hehehe :P The power outage made me realize that everyone in the world needs to just slow down and relax. Chill and spend quality time with the people you love... I mean, there's really nothing better to do. This may sound strange, but I really do hope that another power outage comes around; not for an extended period of time, but long enough to help people realize the true meaning of the season.