C is for Cookie, (that's good enough for me)

This weekend was spent making cookies and doing small errands. My phone died early Saturday morning but luckily I woke up around 8:15am and made it to my grandma's house. She had me re-wrap a gift and send it back to the giver (shoes didn't fit comfortably). After stopping off at the post office I went to Target to return some lights we bought (it turned out that there were 3 strings of lights in the crawl space). While in Target my brain turned off and I wandered the aisles aimlessly wishing that I was more tuned in to what people want (for Christmas). Eventually I forced myself to the check-out line and made my way to the grocery store. Other than trouble finding molasses (syrup area, not baking), that went smoother than the Target trip.

Back at home I started the cookie process. In all I made 4 types of cookies... sugar, gingerbread men, candy cane, and corn flake wreaths. Since our porch is a "one-season," I just kept the dough out there to chill. Not long after we moved in to this house I reorganized the spices and put some of them into old baby food containers. When I tried to get the container with ginger in it open I had trouble. I used grandma's special "atlas grip" gloves, had Dave try, and finally came up with this solution -


(solution being to jab madly at the lid with a corkscrew until I had a suitable opening).

Other cooking mishaps include overly sticky goo for the corn flake wreaths, they are made very similarly to rice krispie bars... melt butter and marshmallows together and then stir in the cereal. I think the problem was that I had made one batch without incident and instead of cleaning out the green sludge (you add food coloring and vanilla to the wreath recipe), I just added new butter and marshmallows. The thing turned against me and was almost impossible to scoop out of the pot. I think the green food coloring may have done something bad, or the marshmallows were too sticky, or maybe I didn't add enough butter the second time. Here are some Pioneer Woman inspired cooking pics of the crushed candy canes, the before and after. Lastly, in the cooking department, since I didn't have raisins I used frosting and red hots for decoration on the gingerbread men. Sometimes the red hots melted a little and looked demonic, which resulted in some interesting decoration...At last cookies were finished so I decided to venture out on the frozen lake.
I started timidly along the shore and stomped around quite a bit. It's been pretty cold up here (between 0F and 25F) so I wasn't too worried. After a while I got comfortable and started twirling around. I was too lazy to go back and grab my skates but there's a pretty good patch for skating in the "bay."to end the post, my favorite Christmas song, performed by Santa's Marching Band.