Woo Hoo, we are READY for Christmas!! Hubby and I went on Monday and finished up the last of the shopping that we needed to do to get the rest of the kids presents together. Monday night we had our Girl Scout Meeting where we did Christmas Crafts and that was a total BLAST!! We learned how to make bath salts, the girls made the Polar Express Bell, the made candy cane rudolph reindeer’s, a couple of orniments for the tree, and a Santa made out of a Baby food jar to put the bath salts in. If you would like to see the baby food jar Santa you can see it HERE. When I was a Girl Scout 30 years ago we had made a similar project that we put Christmas candy in. Who would have thought that I would be making a similar project with my daughter all these years later. I am looking forward to more crafts to do with our Girl Scouts through this next year, they seem to have the attention span and focus to allow us to do some great crafts this year.
I became a member of Pinterest over the last couple of weeks, and WOW!! With all the great things that are posted in that group and on the linked blogs there will be no shortage of crafts and recipes to try out!! And speaking of recipes…..one of the last things that we had to do to get ready for Christmas was to make Christmas Cookies and yesterday we went over to my sister’s house for out annual Christmas Cookie making session. This is a big deal for us, you see because when we did this with my Mom it used to be an all day event. Mom used to make several batches of the dough and she would cook while we would all decorate. It usually took us about 6 to 8 hours when my Mom was alive. Now when my sister and I get together we do a somewhat condensed session. My kids will usually only decorate for a little over an hour before they get tired and just want to play. I am usually impressed that they will work for that long. Generally we end up with 75-100 cookies anyway. This year I decided to take some pictures of the process. By the time we got there my sister had the cookie dough ready to start cutting…..so the pictures start from there.
After the dough is rolled out, each cookie is carefully cut out…..lol…..
Cookies before they go into the oven….
Coloring the icing….
Almost ready to start decorating…..just have to cool off….
The table is ready…..we cover the table in paper to make clean up easier….
The kids get to work….. they are doing a GREAT job…..
The finished product!!
And the recipe if you would like it:
Carole’s Holiday Cookies
1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 cup sugar
1 egg
2 3/4 cup (scant) flour
5 teaspoons baking powder
5 tablespoons orange juice
grated rind of one orange
Cream together butter and sugar, blend in egg. Sift together flour and baking powder. Add flour mix alternately with orange juice. Stir in orange rind. Chill dough. Roll out, cut and arrange on greased cookie sheet. Bake at 350 degrees for 5 min.
(We have modified this recipe to use orange juice concentrate instead of orange juice. It gives a better flavor. So you would use 5 tbsp orange juice concentrate instead of just orange juice)
Icing
6 tablespoons butter or margarine
4 1/2 – 4 3/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 cup orange juice concentrate
1 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
Cream all ingredients together until smooth (you may want to use a blender). Seperate into different bowls and mix in food coloring choices.
Enjoy, hope you have a Merry Christmas!!
I may try to do a bit more cooking in the next couple of days. I have found a breakfast pizza to make for Christmas morning for the kids, hubby wants a jalapeno, sausage and egg casserole for breakfast so I will be making that for him. Looking forward to seeing the kids faces in 2 days, I hope I remember to take pictures….lol.
Until next time…..