Kitchen Adventures

So today was the day! Every year we set one day aside to do all of our Christmas baking, and today was it. Of course you have to have the chocolate chip cookies.



Which is where I started my day. Honestly, I make the best chocolate chip cookies ever! Much thanks to The Wooden Spoon Amish cookbook for that one. Mom always has to make spiders. I'm not sure if that is the real name for them, but it's what we have always called them. Just mix together melted butterscotch, chow mien noodles and some peanuts and walla! You have spiders.



A Christmas MUST in the candy department is fudge. Now don't go messing around with it either, just plain chocolate fudge. Don't get me wrong I love the chocolate peanut butter, cookies n cream, peppermint and such, but for Christmas the plain chocolate fudge is a necessity.



Next on the list is something we have added to the sweets menu in the past few years, peppermint bark. We had to play with it this year since we usually use a specific source of peppermint that wasn't in the Harris Teeter. So instead of being the usual pink/red it turned out looking mainly like chocolate, but has an amazing minty taste.



My all time favorite Christmas candy is peanut butter balls, also known as buckeyes depending on where in the country you live. Pop one of these in your mouth and it's just heavenly! There's no other way to describe it.



We tried something new this year that I don't have a picture of, but it is peanut butter mixed together with melted butterscotch. Add in some chex cereal and chocolate chips. That's it! Let it cool and you have a sweet and oh so tasty snack.

Last but definitely not least in the Christmas goodies was the famous sugar cookies. These I have a story behind. This was the first year that I have been in charge of mixing them up all by myself! So exciting, yet nerve racking because this is the cookie of cookies when it comes to Christmas, at least in our house. So as I'm mixing up all the ingredients noticing it is a little sticky instead of dough like I was hoping I had done everything right. Of course that is when mom comes along needing the recipe book and asked if I was done with it. I answered yes and she asked if I had remembered the 3 TSP of vanilla since it was on a different line than all the other ingredients. Oh no... I had remembered the vanilla, but I misread the amount and added 3 TBSP! So that is pretty much like tripling the original amount. We had a good laugh about it, but in the end the dough was much to sticky and hard to work with so there are no cute shapes this year, just plain round little cookies. They taste mostly the same, the vanilla is definitely noticeable, but in the end my mistake only turned into laughter and a good story instead of some ruined cookies.