Christmas Cookies

Did you bake cookies this Christmas? We did. See the little bears in the lower left of the photo? Those were my favorites. I used to read a book to my girls when they were little called, "The Gingerbear's First Christmas". I think I bought the book from the Current catalog. It was a cute little story about a family who had many things on their list and they were so tired from all the extra activities that had to be done for the holidays. The mom fell asleep in a chair. The little bears did all her baking, did the dishes and cleaned the kitchen. You can tell the book was fiction as no one except moms do the dishes and clean the kitchen!!! lol Well, I made my gingerbread cookies to look like the Gingerbears with little cinnamon red hot hearts.

Mrs. Claus (my sister) invited me to her house to bake lots of cookies.

I took two days of vacation before Christmas, loaded my cookie cutters, cookie sheets, parchment paper rolls, recipes, rolling pins, etc., etc. and headed out at 5:00 a.m. on Wednesday morning.....in the pouring California rain! I think you might've heard a little something about our crazy weather. I'm not used to getting up that early but my hubby thought even though it was raining, I wouldn't hit as much traffic as if I left later. It was a good idea but I had to have a little cat nap when I got to my sister's house while my sis got her shower and got ready. Once I rested, we baked all day. We started with all the batches of dough that had to be refrigerated. By early afternoon we had some cookies rolled out and ready to frost. I stayed the night and headed out the next day with cookie tins in tow. It was a much nicer drive home.

I came home to some pretty homemade Christmas cards from my stampin' buddies. I'll share those in my next post. And this adorable potholder from my buddy Carolyn. It's so cute, I think I'll give up cooking so I don't risk ever getting it dirty. LOL

Do you take your Christmas decorations down right after Christmas? I don't. I love, Love, LOVE Christmas and even though I'm ready for my house to be back to normal, I'll wait until New Years weekend to take down all of the decorations.

Living up to my name....Busy Liz

Monday night I was going through some UFO's and bags of blocks, looking for a project or two to take to my retreat this coming weekend. One thing lead to another and I had this charm pack in my hands and then up on the design wall and then under the needle of my machine. :o) How does that happen? I pulled some cream on cream fabric from my stash (it was perfect) for the setting triangles and a small border. Then I went to a drawer I don't visit often, full of old Robyn Pandolph fabrics from about five years ago and I might be able to use a couple of them for borders or backing. The big rose border seems a little off so I might not use it. It'll just be a little throw for the couch for the holidays. The charm packs were small so I had bought two of them but could've used a few more fabrics to make this a bit bigger. The line is called Fancy Hill Farm by Robyn Pandolph. We'll do some shopping at the shop that is hosting the retreat so maybe I'll find something there for the outer border. I'm loving this "use it up" from the stash!

But I can't jump to Christmas just yet. I saw these adorable little mummy Halloween cookies on this website. I HAD to make some so off to Calico Cake Shop I went after work. I got all the supplies I needed. I might've been able to get some supplies from Michael's but I knew they wouldn't have the "eyes" and the cake shop has DELICIOUS white chocolate!! :o)

While I waited for my daughter Kelley to come over after work, I used my double boiler and melted the chocolate.

Got the sucker sticks ready...

And got my cookies ready. I bought both regular and vanilla Oreo cookies. You heard me, vanilla Oreos!!!! Who knew? I could take or leave regular Oreos but these were really good, kind of like Vienna Fingers but crispier. Yum! Anyway, according to the directions, you're supposed to open the cookie, dip the stick in the white chocolate, put it between the cookie layers and let it set. Well, my chocolate Oreos kept breaking. Every single one. And there were a lot of them broken in the package. So frustrating when you're trying to do a project. Oh well, what are you going to do? While watching the little video on the website, I heard the girl say to use 'double stuff' Oreos. Roh-Rroh-Relroy!! For some reason the vanilla cookies were a little sturdier so I made more of those than the chocolate ones.

Once they were set, they got dipped in the white chocolate and got their eyes on. hehe

The cake store only had two packages of big eyes so I bought some small ones too. Kelley and I liked the smaller ones after the cookies were done. She put her eyes farther apart than I did mine and I liked the look better. Her little guys really looked like crazy little monsters. :o) We wrapped the cookies in cello bags for giving away. I'm taking mine to the retreat as a little 'favor'. Kelley used some tags I had punched out and tied them on her suckers. She's going to give one to her little sis (they work together) and will give some to co-workers. I saved a few for my middle daughter too. We did Nutter Butter cookies too. They looked like little ghosties. We didn't cut them off like they had them on the website.

The little box in the photo (above) is a free download from the HowDoesShe website so sign up. They've got some cute free printables.

They were fun and even though the ones on the website were cuter, they were fun to make and had I gotten those double stuff Oreos, it probably would've been fine so it's all good. I think I've gotten my fix for this Halloween. (If I stay off the internet!!!) lol