The holiday season has been exceptionally kind to us so far, if you consider that I’ve found time to make a lot of cookies and not a lot of time to shop for/wrap gifts or rack floorboards in our master bedroom in anticipation of my loosely self-mandated 12/25 deadline. This time of year is swell, but there’s never enough time to enjoy it all, hence my absence over the week.
While many of my days were spent swooning over super cool new house-related items delivered by the UPS man (for me, not gifts for others, shame, I’ll show you someday), I did manage to keep busy working on several projects for DIY Network:
On Thursday, I joined in the National Hard Candy Day celebrations and learned how to make my own hard candies. The recipe turned out really good, but I do wish I had chosen a different flavor than cherry, a cinnamon or orange, perhaps. Cherry tasted like–and made my kitchen smell like–children’s cough syrup, which was good (nostalgic!) for all of 3 minutes, and then almost forced me to open up windows to ventilate. Good news is, hard candy is super easy to make (who knew!) so you should try it for yourself someday.
After our Christmas tree fell over, I had some big ornament holes to fill, so I took it as an opportunity to make a few by hand with the family. All of our new contributions considered, I especially like how our giant salt dough snowflakes turned out, and the miniature paper tree ornaments are pretty cute too. Also, it’s the second year in a row that we created thumbprint ornaments, and I really love how these simple pieces will be used to continuously document our family’s growth.
Julia proclaimed this candy cane doormat one of my best crafty projects ever, and I can’t say that I’ll argue it much. It turned out pretty well, and has looked really cute on our doorstep for the past few weeks.
Finally, considering that I’ve barely started my holiday shopping, it may be a heavy gift card year, friends and family. I toyed with a few alternate wrapping methods this month, if you’re looking for more exciting ways to wrap those simple presents.
And P.S. If you’re dessert makin’ this weekend, here are some recipes that I tried this week that you might like too:
- Clementine Butter Cookies
- Chocolate covered Oreos (You really don’t need a recipe to melt chocolate and drown Oreos, they are so yummy.)
- Turtle Cheeseball
- Russian teacakes (Look it up. Mine is a recipe from a friend, bite size morsels with loads of pecans… we ate 40 in 2 days, yikes).
- And it’s not a new recipe, but we made hundreds of cutouts using my mom’s recipe.
Leave A Reply