Sugar, Sugar (cookies)

One of my family traditions is cut out sugar cookies.  We celebrate Christmas on Christmas Eve and one of the things we do together is decorate cookies together.  This year I'm bringing the dough and we'll bake and frost at my parent's house.  We've used the same recipe for years and they always turn out great!  I thought I would share:

 Ingredients:
1 cup butter, room temperature
1 1/2 cups sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
3 1/2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
1 1/4 tsp salt

Directions:
Cream butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla together.  Sift flour with the baking powder and salt and then slowly add to wet ingredients and mix well.  Chill dough several hours/over night.  Roll out (using flour) and cut out with cookie cutters.  Place on baking sheet at bake at 375F for 6-8 minutes, depending on size.  Watch edges as cookies easily brown.  If the edges are browned, remove from oven.

Note, I used parchment paper to prevent sticking to the cookie sheet.

Once cookies cool, frost/decorate!

Glaze:  I glazed the cookies in the photo with an easy glaze of powdered sugar, cream, vanilla and food coloring.  I started with 2 cups powdered sugar and added 2 T cream and a splash of vanilla (1/4 teaspoon) to start, mixing well.  I wanted a thick glaze that would stay on the cookie.  Keep adding cream or powdered sugar until you get to the desired consistency.  Once they were glazed, I let the cookies sit out overnight to harden.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas....

We've been busy baking, decorating, wrapping and enjoying the holidays over here.  Hope you have been too!  Last night we finished most of the prep work for the holidays (just a little more food to prepare for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) so I thought I would share some peaks of our holiday with you:

Holiday Baking:

And gifting (we give away most of the treats as gifts to co-workers and clients):

 

Holiday Crafting:

Making gift cards more personal-homemade gift bags

Homemade wine bottle gift bags

And decorating (I wanted lights and greenery above the bay window but I'm told that isn't possible...maybe next year!):

Thank goodness for UPS and FedEx, I ordered 90% of our
gifts online this year and everything came in time!

What have you been doing to prepare for Christmas?  What are some of your favorite Christmas traditions? We cannot have Christmas without cut-out sugar cookies....I make them 1 time a year and they are so delicious!  We also go to Midnight Mass and have breakfast with C's family afterward.  It's such a fun tradition that I'm hoping to be able to stay awake for this year!

Posts of Christmas' Past:

Christmas in our NC Apartment (2008)
Christmas (2008)
Fitting a 7 1/2 foot tree in my Jetta (2009)
Christmas Prep-Our Old House (2009)
Christmas-C was on leave from Afghanistan (2009)
Stocking I made for Grant (2011)
Too busy for Christmas?-Grad School (2011)

Dark Chocolate Sea Salted Toffee

After we were married, C's Mom gifted me with an awesome book, a homemade book of all of the family's favorite Christmas cookie and candy recipes!  When I was planning my holiday baking this year, I asked C what he wanted me to make and his answers didn't surprise me: Chocolate Peanut Butter Buckeyes and Toffee.  I also wanted to make some cut-out frosted sugar cookies and peanut butter cookies so I had a very short list this year...thankfully as we don't need all the sweet treats and I certainly won't be running off the extra calories for another couple of months.  We give most of my baking away, either to neighbors or work clients or colleagues so we don't have too much of it floating around but it wouldn't be the holidays without some of the good stuff!     

My holiday cookie Bible!

 I decided to make a few changes to the already delicious Toffee recipe and it turned out fantastic so I thought I would share:

Ingredients:

1 cup butter

1 1/4 cups sugar

2 T corn syrup

2 T water

1 cup almonds, slivered and toasted

1-2 cups DARK chocolate chips (I used Ghiradelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate)

Course sea salt

Directions:

Line a 15x10x1in pan with foil, evenly sprinkle almonds on bottom of pan and set to the side.  In a heavy saucepan (with candy thermometer attached-very important!) combine butter, sugar, corn syrup and water on medium to medium high heat.  Stir mixture constantly until it boils.  Continue to cook (and stir) until 300F on candy thermometer.  Remove from heat and pour mixture over almonds until even.  Sprinkle chocolate over brittle and let stand until shiny.  Smooth with a spatula and top sprinkle with sea salt (personal preference on how much to add).  Let cool and refrigerate for 1 hour.  Store at room temperature in a sealed  container (don't store with any other treats as the moisture content of cookies will make the toffee soft and sticky) and enjoy! 

Christmas Card Photos!

'Tis the season for all things holiday and our annual Christmas card!  We (um, I) thought it would be fun to use our new camera (thanks Mom and Dad for the early Christmas gift!) to take a self-timer photo for our holiday card this year.  Lesson learned: it's very hard to get two people and two dogs to all look in the same direction and not be blurry using the self-timer.  Especially since we were on a limited time frame since we had childbirth class to get to.  I imagine next year will be even harder with a baby to consider, we may be going the professional photo route instead.

Here are a few of our (failed) attempts!

Chris, pointing at the camera to get Lila to look:

Lila trying to lick C's face and Max not looking:

 Thank goodness, a usable photo!

 And one of the three of us :)