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.

It’s been a while…

I’ve been so busy these past 6 months that I haven’t really had time to update this thing. I also had the misfortune of having my laptop crash and so I lost all of my photos of my birthday cake and my Christmas cookies and treats that I made last year.

Luckily, I still have a few photos of my Christmas Eve cake that I had saved in my email account that I can share with you.

The winter house cake was a traditional cherry pound cake with vanilla buttercream icing. I baked the cake in Wilton’s stand-up, 3D house cake pan. I made the wreath from royal icing and decorated it with sprinkles before letting it dry and attaching it to the cake. The green garlands around the door and windows were made from buttercream piped directly onto the cake and decorated with various sprinkles to look like ornaments. The snowman and the hedges were made from Rice Krispies treats molded by hand and covered in royal icing. The snowman and the icing snow on the cake board were covered in coconut to make them look fluffy. The evergreen trees were ice cream sugar cones covered in green royal icing that was piped using a star tip. I used chocolate pebbles to create the step in front of the door and for the border around the snow-covered flower beds. Originally, I wanted to dust icing sugar over the trees and the hedges to look like freshly fallen snow, but I decided against it because dusting powdered sugar never works out quite right for me. So, I left it as is. FYI, that's my Christmas tree in the background of the photo.

And here is my father’s birthday cake that I made a couple of weekends ago.

The pig pen cake is a two-layer, 8-inch brownie cake with chocolate ganache between the layers, decorated with chocolate ganache, chocolate cookie crumb "dirt," green vanilla buttercream "grass," and a pretzel fence to look like a pig pen. I made a gate for the pig pen by gluing pieces of pretzel together with royal icing and then letting it dry on a piece of wax paper. I made the pigs, vegetables, bees, ladybugs, and flowers from homemade marshmallow fondant. In case you're wondering, I made potatoes, carrots, apples, corn, cabbages, and pumpkins. Notice the pig at the top of the pen who dove right into the mud to get at his grub. All you can see are his leg, bum, and ears sticking out.

I also made some Easter brownies.

These are chocolate walnut brownies covered in a layer of chocolate ganache and decorated with homemade marshmallow fondant flowers and leaves, assorted sprinkles, and Hershey’s Eggies.

It's likely that I won't have much time to update for the next little while. For some (stupid?) reason, I applied and was accepted to another master's program. So, my cakes and cookies will be few and far between, but I'll be twice as master-y as I was before.

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.

A Spring Snow Day with a Whiff of Christmas

While there’s definitely a part of me that wants spring to just hurry up and get here already, I’m not going to complain about this completely unexpected snow day, especially when I was able to spend most of it curled up on the couch in my office/craft room listening to the Strokes. How decadent it feels to have a day off that’s not full of chores or scheduled things to do, which is what I normally do when I have a planned day off from work.

A couple of days ago, I finally found an aptly named Perfect Pie Crust recipe, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Good because now I can make pies with amazingly buttery, flaky crust. Bad because now all I want to do is make pies. On Wednesday after I got home from work, I used the newfound recipe to make an Unintentionally Greek quiche of sorts out of spinach, onions, garlic, red pepper, feta cheese and eggs, just the things that were close to going bad in my fridge, like my Unintentionally Italian soup that I made over a month ago.

Later that same night I made a coconut cream pie, following this recipe for the filling. The Perfect Pie Crust recipe makes enough for two bottom-only pies or tarts, or in this case a quiche and a pie.





I toasted the coconut first and doubled the amount. I also doubled the vanilla, which I always do for every dessert recipe that calls for vanilla, and I added a drop of coconut extract. I used the same Perfect Pie Crust recipe (baked it blind and let it cool), which has no sugar in it, but it was fine for this pie, a nice complement to the sweet coconut custard. Half of this recipe with the doubled coconut is enough to fill one pie shell, but I only made it with custard, not whipped cream on top like most coconut cream pies because even I impose some limits on dessert decadence. Except for eating a slice of the pie for breakfast. That level of decadence is well within my limits, particularly on a rare early spring snow day when it seems as if anything goes.

As I already said, the problem with finding the perfect pie crust recipe is that now all I want to do is make pies. The crust is so easy to make and turns out so perfectly that I have no excuse not to make a pie (or two!) every day for the rest of my life. Except for my waistline, of course. What I want to conquer next is one of those fancy fruit flans, a classic tarte aux fruits, with the multi-coloured concentric circles of fresh fruit on top.

I want to try my hand at making a pavlova at some point, too. I had never even heard of pavlova until I watched Nigella Lawson make one on her Forever Summer series on TV. It's a big baked meringue dessert, essentially. I could watch Nigella cook and bake for hours on end. Nigella’s Bribery and Corruption Drawer, her cupboard full of chocolate and treats in her kitchen, is the sort of thing that I would have myself in my own kitchen if I only had more willpower. I have a strong feeling that the only person who would be corrupted by having a big ol' stash of chocolate in the house is me. I just think the incongruence of the beautiful, sophisticated, food-writer Nigella showing us her cupboard full of junk is hilarious, which is why I like her.

Speaking of incongruence, and seeing as how nothing screams “early spring snowstorm” like a dark Christmas fruitcake (ha!), I baked a fruitcake today. Not one of those boozey, pudding-like concoctions that you have to bake a year in advance and then put in a dark cupboard and feed it a spoonful of booze every day until Christmas or anything. No, that process sounds too much like something out of a Dickens novel for my tastes, like some poor, alcoholic orphan-child confined to a dank corner of the workhouse, languishing from lack of sunlight and nutrition, kept docile with an occasional dram of gin. I don't know why my brain automatically makes that association between  fruitcake and Victorian-era orphans, but it does.





This doesn't look like an drunken orphan to me at all, not with all those blackberries and my best attempt at fancy-pants piped icing, which is actually light Cool Whip.

Anyway, I had dried cherries, prunes, raisins and a handful of dried cranberries that had been kicking around for ages in my cupboard, along with two slices of crystallized ginger that have been in my spice basket for as long as I can remember. No nuts, though; I didn’t have any. So I modified a recipe that I found online, chucked everything that I could find in, and there you go. It's moist and spicy now but I bet after a couple of days in the container, it will be even awesomer.

The only issue with it occurred when I turned the cake out of the loaf pan when part of the bottom stuck to the pan, but in retrospect, maybe if I had better prepared the pan before pouring in the batter, like with greased parchment paper or something, then it could have helped the cake from sticking. Then again, I’m sure that everything that I did—i.e. baking a dark fruit cake in late March, not making it the traditional way, using old dried-up odds and ends from the back of my baking cupboard, and eating it with (gasp!) blackberries and light Cool Whip, of all things--is highly disreputable and violates every sense of propriety that most sensible bakers have, but I don’t care because, guess what?! The cake is delicious and it's a snow day in Spring and my house smells like Christmas! It’s that unmistakable smell of happiness and home and coziness and the prospect of exciting things just around the corner. You just can’t get that happy smell out of a bottle, so even if it is technically "spring," I’ll take a whiff of Christmas whenever I can get it.

"If I had rocks in my head, I wouldn’t be any smarter"

OK, enough already, Winter! You win! Apparently, no amount of fist shaking and complaining loudly and frequently about the state of the roads can deter you. The poor scarecrows in my back yard didn’t stand a chance against your snowy onslaught. Just look:



Taken on February 3^rd after a blustery morning.


 Taken on the afternoon of February 12th.

Even though the one on the left is up to his straw-filled armpits with snow, and the one on the right lost his armpits weeks ago, they still look pretty happy sitting out there wearing their little snow caps.

One good thing about this winter weather was getting an unexpected day off today due to an office power outage. I came back home around 10 AM this morning with the intention of making the most of my time by heading straight to my home office/craft room and digging into my research paper, but I ended up heading out to the kitchen to make a wicked pot of soup out of various containers of vegetables, some raw and some leftover roasted, that were kicking around in my fridge, instead. It turned into what I like to call "Unintentionally Italian" roasted vegetable soup with white kidney beans.

The best pots of soup are made from the dregs and back corners of my fridge—I just gather things up, throw them in the pot with some stock and hope for the best, and I always get something better than I expected. Lately it seems as if I’ve been making a pot of soup every week, mainly because I’ve had more fresh vegetables on hand and there’s no way to use them up otherwise, so I always make them into soup before they rot or take on a life of their own and start to cackle and hiss at me from the crisper drawer.

Anyway, tonight I was feeling nostalgic (and by “nostaligic” I mean too lazy to fastidiously nitpick/edit my literature review for my paper) and so I started looking for opening theme songs from the TV shows from my childhood on YouTube, like  Gummi Bears, She-Ra, Jem, etc. What’s strange is that I can barely remember what I had for lunch (oh, right--fridge-raid soup!), and yet I can still clearly remember all the words to the Muppet Babies opening theme. And it’s just as infectious now as it was then—I tapped my foot and bobbed my head the whole way through!




After my embarrassing singalong with the Muppet Babies, my old friend Synchronicity tapped me on the shoulder and I began to feel smugly justified in my procrastination as I came across one of my favourite shows from when I was very young, Tales of the Wizard of Oz, which in the following episode, like my pictures above, featured a bodiless scarecrow. (Yes, I can sing along to this theme song, too.)


I'm going to call the bodiless scarescrow in my back yard Socrates. I don't think I'll try to stuff his head with fish, though.