The Most Delicious Time of the Year!

 I cannot tell you what a wonderful feeling it was to hand in my final paper on December 6th and be done my first Masters class EVER! Better yet, I got an 88% in the class which I was extremely happy with.

After my paper was handed in, I could focus on more important, more Christmas-related things.

And so the stockings were hung.

And my happy helpers assisted in decorating the rest of the house.

I use the word "assisted" very loosely.

After all the decorating was complete, I felt that something was missing and it was then I realized that I had been so busy with school work that I had absolutely no Christmas baking in the house. In my opinion, this is NOT acceptable during the holidays.

I had recently received a forward from my mom that contained tonnes of cookie recipes. I was feeling a bit nostalgic, so I decided on making classic Candycane Cookies. These cookies were the best when I was a kid and I remember how excited I used to get when we would make them.  Little did I know what I was getting myself into.

I called a friend of mine to come help bake and so it began.

We gathered our ingredients.

I should mention that she brought her happy helper over too....

We made our dough, split the dough in half and covered one of the halves in red food colouring. That left us with two balls of multi coloured dough.

Great pic....notice my toes made a cameo.

From there, we took about a tablespoon of each, rolled them out and then twisted them together...

Yes, her kitty stayed there for the duration of our time baking. Sanitary? No. Adorable? Yes, most definately.

Once we twisted the dough together we molded the dough into candy canes...this process was the most frustrating bake task I had tackled in a while. Despite following the recipe, the dough was dry and thus it was very hard to work with. It crumbled and fell apart all over the counter. It took over half an hour to twist the dough into about a dozen candy canes.Somehow we managed to keep patient enough to finish twisting and moulding, and finally get the candy canes into the oven.

Before baking we added crushed peppermint (to some cookies not all....the BF apparently does not like peppermint...learned something new again) which we had to manually push into each cookie. Otherwise we just had a bake pan covered in peppermint instead of peppermint cookies. The stupid crushed peppermint (which took my friend at least a half hour to crush manually) would not stick to the frickin cookies. It was a mess.

Thankfully, some of the peppermint stayed and the finished product looked something like this.

I think to start off the bake season, I would recommend a recipe much less labour-intensive and messy.  Once the cookies were baked, the candy cane was melted onto the pans so much that half the cookies broke when they were transferred from the bake pan to a plate. Whatever. Sugar cookies and peppermint combined taste like Christmas to me. I am such a sucker for the holidays and all the traditions that come along with it. Next tradition? Bake Exchange 2010!


 ADELLE