One of the things I wanted to accomplish on my week-long vacation this winter, other than grilling some tasty meat, was to get my baking in order for my Christmas party this weekend. What I had originally planned as a two-day baking adventure has turned into a three-day expedition, in part due to a decision to watch Immortals today rather than tomorrow when it wasn’t going to be in theaters anymore (I’ll review it in a separate post).
Wednesday I put my baking list together and went over to my parents’ to start baking with my mom. While I am a decent cook and can work out some pretty tasty pasta and grilled meat, baking hasn’t been one of my strong suits, especially when it comes to cookies. I was usually at work when the time came to make Christmas cookies, so this was a new experience for me.
We began with a round of spritz, which are small butter cookies that you make with a cookie press. We use a Christmas-tree shaped press and color the dough green. Any time you start with 3 sticks of butter, you know you’re moving in the right direction (as of Thursday night, we’ve used about 2 pounds of butter so far).
After the spritz I put together a batch of dough for peppermint pinwheels, and then I started in on a batch of peanut brittle. The peppermint pinwheels are two separate sheets of dough rolled together and can be a bit tricky to put together, but they’re worth it. I also mixed up some dough for the peanut butter temptations, but didn’t have the peanut butter cups to put in them, so that went into the fridge as well. We closed out the day with a batch of chocolate fudge with cashews. My mom questioned why the recipe instructed her to butter the wax paper, since I could pat down the melted chocolate and evaporated milk mixture without it sticking to my hand, but my response was, simply, “It’s Christmas, Mom! Butter you wax paper!”
We’re not kidding about the butter thing.
Thursday We started out by baking up the peanut butter temptations. These are essentially a peanut butter cookie wrapped around a Reese’s Miniature Peanut Butter Cup. Despite their size, they really are more like two-bite cookies than one-bite cookies.
After the peanut butter temptations, we baked up the peppermint pinwheels from Wednesday. Peppermint pinwheels, as alluded to above, are a pinwheel cookie with two sheets of dough; one is dyed red and peppermint-flavored, the other tastes pretty much like a sugar cookie. Leaving them rolled up together in the fridge overnight tends to make the whole thing taste like peppermint, but after some careful shaping on my mom’s part we got that batch done as well. We took a break and went to see Immortals (later post), then came back and made sugar cookies, using an old family recipe.
Tomorrow (Friday), my plans are to make up revel bars (a layer of melted chocolate and walnuts between two layers of an oatmeal-cookie-like dough), some chocolate-dipped pretzel rods, and I’m going to try my hand at bread and make some garlic and herb bread for dipping Saturday night. I’ve never made bread before, and it’s been a while since I’ve had fresh-baked bread. I thought it would be a good way to take Saturday’s party from “good” to “great”, so we’ll see how it goes. I’m going to adapt a recipe that is supposed to make 1 medium rectangular loaf to at least one French bread-shaped loafs, and I’m pretty excited for it. Pictures to follow.
Tonight I went to a Holland Young Professionals event at perhaps one of my favorite local restaurants, Wild Chef. I’ve talked about Wild Chef previously, and I was pretty excited to go there again with a new group of friends. It was a good time, and afterwards we went over to a friend’s house for a night of Texas Hold ‘Em and beer.
Granted, it wasn’t super cold, so I was probably missing out on the full flavor experience.
Anyways. I’m going to begin by saying this: I do not play poker. In the last year, I think I’ve played poker maybe one other time. If you go back another year you’ve got maybe another two times, and at least one of those was against a guy who played a ton of online poker. I know, roughly, which hands beat which, but I don’t have too much of a sense for when to check, when to fold, and when to raise. Buy-in was $5, which I figured wasn’t too big of a deal for the learning curve, and I’m proud to say I ended the night $10 richer. I’ll attribute it more to dumb luck than anything else, although there were some exquisite hands; the one the stands out particularly well in my mind was a hand that started with pocket aces (instant win, no?) that I was ultimately figuring I’d pair with the pair of Jacks that were laid down on the table. I figured I had this one in the bag, but I didn’t want to push it, so I just matched and stayed in the game. What I was not expecting: the other guy holding pocket Jacks for a four of a kind. Bugger.
Still, not a bad start.
Leave a Reply