Food, Food, and MORE Food!

You'll never guess what I did today....ok, ok, I'll tell ya....I made food...baked to be more specific- are you shocked? Surprised? Not really? Ok, neither am I...but hey, I figured I'd do it now because I'm working Monday and Tuesday and then it's Christmas. Won't feel like baking after playing with the kiddos all day Monday and Tuesday, so it's happening this weekend or not at all.

Last night the little man and I were alone while hubby and the girls were at the girl's youth club. (Hubby was one of the adult chaperones) So I suggest to little man that we would make some candy....I figured if anything was going to tear him away from the computer games it was candy...and I was right...we made our own version of after eight mints, using a plastic bag and piped the minty mixture onto a cookie sheet and then we added melted chocolate and let everything get hard. Then we made white chocolate haystacks with dark chocolate stripes...was going to try and be cute and make "snowballs" of these white chocolate and coconut candies, but couldn't get them to roll into pretty balls, so they became haystacks...which are JUST as good!!!!

I also doubled my french bread dough and stuck them in the fridge, thinking I'd wake today and make four loaves of french bread since it was so popular last time and we'd have some nice bread for breakfast. But something went wrong...I don't know what, it's perplexing, I did everything like I did last time, only I doubled the recipe so we could have four loaves instead of two...but it didn't rise like it did last time and when I baked it, it split and looked weird. Don't laugh but I was so bummed out about this I can't even tell you. When baking goes wrong for me it's like a painter who has messed up their artwork..it's SO frustrating, especially when I don't know what went wrong. So, the bad bread was bagged and will be shared with our bird friends...they are getting lots of leftover bread and some peanut butter cookies that got a little too charred when Julia baked the other day. The birds eat well around here...

So instead of lovely french bread for breakfast, I made country biscuits and my own version of McDonalds Breakfast biscuit. Since I can't find sausage here like we have in the states I use bacon and a fried egg and some cheese and McDonalds has nothing on me!!!!

Then I found a recipe for "Inside out chocolate chip cookies" in other words you get a chocolate cookie with white chocolate for the chunks...mmmmmmm!!! For my fellow Americans living in Scandinavia, the recipe called for unsalted butter, which I didn't have so I used melange which is margarine here. When a recipe has called for Crisco I use this Melange also and it works each time. Of course I can't remember the taste of things with Crisco, so my taste buds might be missing something, but it tastes great and I can highly recommend using Melange when you are lacking Crisco or butter or unsalted butter. These cookies turned out wonderful- taste kinda like coco puffs cereal from the states or a brownie cookie...very very good!!!

Tonight we made chicken fajitas for dinner and I've now officially closed the kitchen for the night, it's exhausting standing in there all day long but I do love it when my baking gets such warm reviews...then it's all worth it!!!!

Oh and my snow dance worked...it was snowing today! Not a lot, but some...the dance went kinda like this: You put your right arm in, you put your right arm out....you put your left arm in and you shake it all about...you do the hokey pokey........wait a second....wrong dance! But it went something like that, shaking and bending...and rockin and rollin....and voila- SNOW!!!! Give it a try and if it doesn't work you can look on the bright side, you just got a bit of exercise in during the holidays!!!! ;-)

Until next time....