A tradition for as long as I can remember, mom and I spend a day baking up all the Christmas goodies for our upcoming gatherings. Sometimes it spreads over two days, like this year. We started by heading out to get supplies. First, I had to get my haircut cuz people were beginning to notice it was getting LONG. (Long for me, BTW, isn’t horribly long. I can’t ever stand it enough to get to that stage.) But then we went to Wally World and got supplies. Lunch was Chinese Buffet. Then home again to start baking.
We started with some snicker doodles that mom bought from a co-worker. These were pre-made & frozen dough balls, ready for baking. The teenage daughter of this co-worker was trying to get money for a school or athletics related trip. And she’s a good dough maker. Then we made the chocolate chip cookies (aka Lindy Cookies – so named after my mom, Linda). We used some really great cookie sheets from KitchenAid which made baking easy-peasey. Mom made the dough for Ice Box cookies (aka butterscotch cookies). Those were then put into loafs & out into the back porch for ice boxing. 🙂 We hit something of an impasse here. We needed the recipe for candy buckeyes, and our favorite recipe was in a cookbook now at the Lake. So I called Granny & asked to borrow their copy. I headed off to visit with her & aunt Becky & pick up the book.
When I got back, it was supper time. I ate light – apple, orange, cashews – and returned to the folks’. Mom had made her praline mix (evil addictive munchy stuff) while I was at Granny’s. We then got to work on the peanut butter innards for buckeyes. That’s one of those things you just have to do by hand, so before too long, I was up to my elbows in peanut butter, powdered sugar, and butter. I then rolled the little buckeyes & we put them out in the back porch to cool. While I’d been rolling, mom was working one another of my favorite holiday treats, floor-sweeping cake. It doesn’t actually have floor sweepings, it just looks like it. 🙂 By then, it was nearing 9pm, so we had Advent & I returned home.
Tomorrow, we dip the buckeyes, bake the Ice Box cookies, and make peanut butter blossoms (aka nipple cookies – you know, the peanut butter ones with Hershey’s kisses in ’em). Oh yeah, and there’s the cheesecake cupcakes. I think we’ll be done then. 🙂
If I’m feeling in a generous mood, I might put the recipes of some of these delectables up in another post. Or I could just let y’all suffer. (judiang & elsaf will get to sample many of these treats this year – unless we eat them all before I get off to visit with them!)