Christmas in February

If I was any good at prankery, I would try in earnest to convince you that today is in fact Christmas. It’s April Fools’ Day, after all. But if any truth could be said about me, it would have to be Homer Simpson’s famous line, “You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine!”

Sadly, I don’t have anything like an electrified fooling machine (and what I really want is a waffle iron). I guess I’m kind of pranking you with the title “Christmas in February” but, to be honest, today totally feels like February. It’s a snow day, my office is closed, everything in town is shut down because we’re going to get at least 100 feet of snow, and we might not see any signs of spring until next Christmas.

Speaking of Christmas, I was so busy during last Christmas that I didn’t get time to write about all of my Christmas makings and bakings during Christmas. Or after Christmas. Or after after Christmas, for that matter. Too many papers, too much work, too much... just much too much. That’s me: much too much. I’m all in, all the time. Why can’t I just be like normal people and not do anything for a change? No, I must make and do ALL of the things. All the cakes, all the crafts, all the cookies, all the fudge, and all of the masters degrees.

Seeing as how I don’t have anything scheduled for today, I decided to make some work for myself by writing one big post that covers my Christmas 2013 treats and post it right at the point when most people have totally forgotten about Christmas. Oh, you’re welcome.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, I made a boatload full of food, including the pie and tarts that I showed you in my last post. FYI, a “boatload” of something is my favourite unit of measurement. I didn’t take photos of everything in the boatload, but I can show you the ones that I did.

Fudge: I forgot to get pictures of my “Everything” fudge (trail mix, cashews, peanuts, almonds, macadamia, pistachios, vanilla cream sandwich cookies, Smarties and M&Ms) and my butterscotch chocolate walnut fudge. But here are photos of my batches of rocky road fudge with mixed nuts and white chocolate candy cane Oreo fudge. 

I just love the look of those big ol' slabs of fudge before they're cut into pieces! By the way, next to “boatload,”  “slab” is my most favourite unit of measurement. The candy cane fudge is made using my favourite Eagle Brand cookies n' cream fudge recipe with candy cane sandwich cookies from Walmart that I call Oreos (or you can use the original Mint Oreos) with chopped candy canes on top.

Cookies: I made some melting snowman chocolate chip cookies and Rudolph oatmeal raisin cookies. 

The melting snowmen were decorated with royal icing to look like melted snow and scotch mints were used for their heads. The reindeers were made using a gingerbread man cookie cutter and decorated upside down. They're decorated with royal icing, chocolate chips for eyes, and a red Smartie for the noses.

Cake pops: After years of following Bakerella’s blog and poring over her books, I finally got over my anxiety and made cake pops for the first time. I made vanilla elves, Christmas trees, and snowmen. It was hard, messy work but totally worth it. After they were completely dry, I packaged them in small, clear cellophane bags secured with a silver twist tie. These photos were taken at night so the lighting is not the best.

I adore the snowmen in their jaunty candy berets! For some reason, the snowmen look very pleased with themselves, like they know they're cute and they’re happy to be here. Those are the kind of snowmen and people I like best: those who are just happy to be wherever they are.

Cupcakes: This year I decided not to do a big decorated cake for Christmas Eve like I usually do but I made cupcakes decorated as little snowy winter scenes instead. These are vanilla cupcakes with vanilla frosting and homemade marshmallow fondant shapes made by hand and using mini cookie cutters.  I made a variety of little fondant characters and shapes for the scenes including snowmen with scarves blowing in the wind, snowmen wearing hats, snow-covered trees, Christmas gifts, reindeer, and Santa hat-wearing gingerbread men.

In case you’re wondering what I did with this stuff, nearly all the treats were given away as gifts to relatives, my coworkers, my mother’s colleagues, and assorted friends and neighbours. The best part is that I got to sample everything I made.  

I keep saying that next year I’m not making anything, but I already know that I’m going to make another boatload of treats topped off with innumerable slabs of fudge. I'd better start planning.

Cake Break

I needed a break from cake so lately I've been making non-cakey treats

I forgot to take a picture of it, but I made White Chocolate and Macadamia Rocky Road squares. It's funny because what originally inspired me to make these squares was the picture of them on the original recipe site, but mine weren't quite as pretty. I made a few tweaks to the original recipe.  I toasted the macadamia nuts and pistachios (or “smishsmashios” as I like to call them) in the oven first to enhance their nuttiness. Instead of dried cranberries, I used dried cherries that I snipped in half with kitchen scissors. I also used unsweetened coconut because that’s what I had on hand.

The only problem I had with this recipe was the proportion of white chocolate to the other ingredients. I used chocolate chips rather than baking chocolate, which was probably the wrong thing to do. I think it needs about one-third more white chocolate chips (so 180g + 60g = 240 g) in order to get it to set up right.

(I always call pistachios "smishsmashios" because it reminds me of the Ghost of Christmas Present/Willie the Giant in Mickey’s Christmas Carol who can’t pronounce pistachios.)

Still in keeping with my Cake Break, for my birthday supper tonight, which is to celebrate my birthday tomorrow on November 25th, I made two types of brownies: Oreo brownies and chocolate chip cookie dough brownies.

For the Oreo brownies, I mixed some chopped Oreos into the brownie batter. Once the brownies were baked and cooled, I made half a recipe of Wilton's vanilla icing (the same one I always use for cake decorating) and mixed in chopped up Oreos. After spreading the Oreo frosting onto the brownies, I pressed a few pieces of cookie into the top.

And here are the cookie dough brownies.

These are just regular brownies with walnuts that, after they cooled, were frosted with a chocolate chip cookie dough frosting, which was made according to this recipe.  I used half vegetable shortening and half butter, regular sized chocolate chips, and I doubled the vanilla.

I used brownie mixes rather than make them from scratch. I find that the boxed brownies mixes always give the best results. I’ve tried several brownie recipes from scratch and they never turn out right.

And finally, because I didn’t want a total Cake Break, I made birthday cake fudge, also known as cake batter fudge.

It gets its name from the fact that it uses boxed cake mix in the recipe. I followed this recipe but I added an extra bit of milk (about 2 tablespoons) and a half teaspoon of clear vanilla extract.

I didn’t think I could find a new favourite fudge recipe but cake batter fudge totally takes the cake. No, let me rephrase that: It takes the cake and the fudge. All of it! It takes all the cake, all the fudge, and everything there is and ever was times infinity it's so good.

I think the only way to improve upon it would be to add gumdrops to make….GUMDROP CAKE FUDGE! Oh, man. That’s the sort of dangerousness that comes from thinking. I'm going to stop that now before I get myself into trouble.

Nuts, Nuts, Nuts

I love unexpected snow days! I love snow mornings, too, even if this snow morning was capped on both ends by frustration. I got to stay home and relax most of the morning due to the weather, even though I had already driven in to work first thing this morning, taken off my coat and boots, and had started opening emails in my office when I got the call saying that the office was going to be closed for the rest of the morning due to the inclement weather, which resulted in me having to drive all the way back home again on the treacherous snow-covered roads, and then drive back to work again only a few hours later on still-treacherous roads when the office reopened. But that’s winter.

And according to some optimistic groundhogs, this winter might end early. I can’t believe it’s Groundhog Day already. Christmas seems like only a distant memory or a dream, something that never really happened. Seriously, though, where did January go? I’ve been so busy that I didn’t even notice it passing. Despite the occasional messy, blustery day, winter has been good so far, and I’ve been making and baking a lot of nutty things the past few weeks.

Like mixed nut butter. I didn’t follow a recipe to make nut butter but there are plenty online. I didn’t blanch the nuts to remove the skins beforehand, however, which is what most recipes seem to recommend. I wanted to keep the fibre in there. Plus, I was too lazy to fuss around with blanching. I used brazil nuts, pecans, and walnuts, all toasted in the oven, about 2.25 cups total, and then buzzed them in the food processor until they resembled a course, grainy flour, making sure to stop before they turned into nut butter. I also added some ground almond meal that I had bought at Bulk Barn.

I didn’t use all of the ground nuts that you see above, just a fraction. I then added a small amount of salt and icing sugar to taste to the ground nut mixture in the food processor and let it all whiz together until it turned creamy and smooth, scraping down the sides with a spatula occasionally. And here's what I got:

The nut butter was so good. I only made a small batch, enough to equal about 1 cup, because this sort of thing probably goes bad quickly.

The rest of the ground nuts were used to make cookies.

I decided to pipe the batter onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet using a Wilton disposable plastic piping bag because it was kind of gloopy. I added raisins to some cookies. I modified this ground almond pie crust recipe  (which I made into a pie crust, as well, but I forgot to take pictures!) to make the cookie batter by adding cinnamon, nutmeg, approximately 1/4 cup of brown sugar instead of sweetener, an extra tablespoon of margarine, one beaten egg, and 1 tsp of vanilla. They were delicious and chewy.

Speaking of delicious and chewy, I also made some coconut macaroons.

My favourite coconut macaroon recipe is one from AllRecipes.com, but I can't seem to find the exact one that I always use as I didn't bookmark it and only have the printed version. These are addictive, though.

And finally I made baked doughnuts!



Ha, I tricked you. Doughnuts aren't made from nuts or coconuts. I made them using my new Wilton doughnut pans (one regular sized pan and one mini pan) that I got for Christmas, and the recipe for the doughnuts was on the pan's package. The trick with using the doughnut pans is not to fill the round cavities too full so that you can get the hole in the middle once the doughnut is baked. Naturally, I filled the cavities in the mini doughnut pan too full and ended up with little one-bite cupcakey things rather than little doughnuts, but they tasted like doughnuts. Some doughnuts I topped with pink royal icing glaze, and the rest were topped with melted chocolate. And lots and lots of sprinkles, of course.

Anyway, I have plans to spend the rest of the winter (which could be six weeks long or six months depending on which groundhog you follow) planning and baking cakes and sewing some little things. Or maybe sewing cakes and baking little things. Either or.

Christmas 2011: Part 2

And now, after Part 1, it's time for Part 2 of my Christmas 2011 busyness in which I outline the other goodies that I made to eat and/or give away as gifts.

A Chocolate Butterscotch Rocky Road Fudge Wreath.




I made this as a last minute dessert for a small get-together to watch Christmas shows on TV. It was made with leftover odds and ends, like semi-sweet chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, marshmallows, and salted mixed nuts. I added some Smarties to the top for colour. (I’ve been putting Smarties on just about everything lately. I like their colours better than M&Ms.) I made it according (roughly) to this Rachael Ray recipe for a five-minute fudge wreath. It's very simple. I used a 6-inch round cake pan and a can of mushrooms covered in foil and sprayed with Pam to make the hole in the center. For something that was thrown together at the last minute it was really, really good.

It was so easy and so good, in fact, that a couple nights later I made another fudge wreath for a Christmas party thrown by my coworker.


This one is a dark chocolate rocky road fudge wreath. For decoration I made some holly and berries using red Smarties and green spice drops that were snipped in half with scissors and molded by hand to look like leaves. I wrapped it up and made a nice little gift out of it.



I used the remaining rocky road fudge to make a Christmas tree.


Remember my Christmas Tree Cake from my last post? It was baked in two foil tree-shaped pans that came with plastic lids, so I used one of the lids lined with plastic wrap to make this fudge tree. Originally, I only intended to have plain Smarties on top, but then I put on a dusting of powdered sugar “snow” and multicoloured nonpareil sprinkles. It looks pretty either way.


The fudge tree was cut into squares and half of them were put on a small plate along with some big gumdrops to give to a relative. The remaining fudge was kept for my family's Christmas Eve dinner.

I also made Nigella Lawsons’s recipe for bar nuts to make a savoury snack mix to bring to my coworker's party.


I changed a few things in the recipe: I used brown sugar rather than muscovado; rather than plain unsalted butter I used garlic butter that I had made ahead of time for another purpose (unsalted butter, fresh grated garlic, salt, pepper, and parsley); I put in only 1 tablespoon of chopped rosemary; I added a half teaspoon of garlic powder; and my nut mixture was about three-quarters salted peanuts in addition to some pecans, walnuts and cashews, so I reduced the salt in the mix down to a half teaspoon. Before packaging the nuts to bring to the party, I added a couple handfuls of small pretzel rods.

Marshmallow Snowmen.



I based them on this recipe. I used royal icing to put on the black nonpareils for the eyes, halved some orange and black round sprinkles with a knife to look like carrot noses and coal mouths, and used coloured round sprinkles for buttons. Flattened red spice drops were used for the bases of the hats with a green spice drop smooshed on top. I love the expressions on their faces. They look as if they’re trying to make the best of a bad situation by apprehensively singing a Christmas carol together as they await their inevtiable fate of being eaten by a small, hungry child.


I wrapped them up just like the fudge wreath above and the plate of cookies in my last post so that they could be given as a gift to my 5-year-old cousin.

A tray of gingerbread men who, unlike the snowmen above, look genuinely happy to be here.


I made back in November to decorate my Christmas Eve cake, which you'll get to see in a moment. I just wanted to introduce them here to build the suspense! Heh. The tray is an old Christmas tray that my mother had for years and had put away in storage until I rescued it. It's been beaten up a bit and has scratches on it from years of use, but it reminds me of all of my great Christmas memories from childhood, which is why I continue to use it and cherish it.

At the last minute today I decided to make some mint chocolate truffles roughly based on this Kraft recipe, which I've used several time before.



I made the base truffle mixture as directed in the recipe, but I had to substitute chopped unsweetened chocolate and icing sugar because I was out of semisweet chocolate chips. I also added some peppermint flavouring so they're super minty like a candy cane. I covered some truffles in Christmas-coloured nonpareil sprinkles and the others in a sparkly mixture of regular and purple sanding sugar. And like most everything I've made this year, I packaged some and gave them away as a last-minute gift.



Here's my Christmas Eve Cheese Tray, which is becoming an annual Christmas tradition.





I made my olive cream cheese penguins and a cheeseball Christmas tree again like last year. Instead of making a cheeseball igloo, however, this year I made cheeseball snowmen. Rather than use the Philadelphia Herb and Garlic Cream Cheese as I have in past years, this year I made the basic cheeseball mix for the tree and snowmen myself from scratch with softened cream cheese, garlic, herbs, salt and pepper, and toasted walnuts and pecans. The Christmas tree cheeseball has bacon bits and cheddar cheese added to about two-thirds of the mix and is covered in dill with pieces of carrot and red pepper for ornaments. The snowmen are made from the remaining basic cheeseball mix with parmesan cheese and a bit of finely grated cheddar added. They have small pretzel rods for arms, carrots for noses, olive eyes, and red pepper and olive hats. I used small cookie and fondant cutters and a knife to cut stars, half-moons, hearts, triangles, circles, reindeer, flowers, and leaves from cheddar, mozzarella, and marble cheeses, and processed cheese slices.

And last but not least, here is what will likely be my final baking project of 2011. Behold my Christmas Eve Cake!





This cake is based on Wilton’s Very Merry Go Round Cake. It’s a small 6-inch chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream filling and icing, with vanilla buttercream accents. The cake is decorated with my homemade regular and mini-sized gingerbread men, candy canes, starlight mints, gumdrops, and other festive candies.

And now with nothing left to make or bake or wrap up or fuss over, I'm going to go and enjoy what's left of Christmas Eve by spending time with my family and trying not to obsess over what I'm going to make for next Christmas.

Merry Christmas!