Cold weather cookies

We had some snow & ice last week (mostly ice!), so I was off work for a day and a half. I decided to spend my time baking cookies!

What better shapes to make than mittens and snowflakes?

 I need to be a bit neater on my snowflakes, but I was in a rush and just making them for fun.

I brought these to work the next day to share.

I used wet on wet icing to add the designs to the mittens so they would lie flat.

I also made some hats to go with the mittens, and as I didn't have a hat cookie cutter I freehanded it. Andrew thought they looked like UFOs. Maybe they would have turned out more hat-like if I had drawn them out first. Icing is not the easiest thing to draw freehand with.

The cookies were yummy, and my coworkers and I ate them all the next day!

Gingerbread House

Seminary housing had a gingerbread contest this Christmas, so Andrew and I rose to the challenge!

We found a template for a gingerbread house, sized it, printed it, and used it to cut out the gingerbread pieces.

Then we baked the gingerbread, crushed butterscotch candies, filled the windows, and put the pieces back in the oven to melt. Before assembling, I piped on the details and Andrew sanded down the edges to fit perfectly with the micro-plane grater.

Andrew made a box base and covered it with foil. He put holes in it so we could fill it with Christmas lights. They lit up the melted candy in the windows to make the house glow. We then put together the house around the bunched up Christmas lights.

Here's the finished product (pardon the not-so-great lighting).

The trees are upside down ice cream cones with dark green icing piped with a star tip. After they dried, I used meringue powder and water (egg whites would have worked, too) to glue on some sanding sugar snow to the branches.

We also added candy canes to the corners of the house.

The snow on the ground is royal icing covered with sanding sugar.

The ceiling is wheat Chex cereal. This took forever! We had to get the Chex pieces to be just the right shape and size to fit in odd roof angles. We dusted the finished roof with powdered sugar snow.

The walkway is made of cappuccino jelly beans.

The berries on the greenery are red sprinkles that I added with tweezers.

We won the housing competition and probably started a new Christmas tradition! This was a lot of fun!

The death of a snowman

Our gravity defying snowman this morning. His eyes, nose, and buttons are scattered on the ground.

This is what I found when I came home from work. Poor frosty...

It Snowed!

It's a winter wonderland here in NC!

The only time it snowed significantly in south Alabama when I was growing up, I was 6 years old. Unfortunately, it was the wrong kind of snow for snowball fights and snowman building. Andrew grew up in Ohio and he is very familiar with the finer aspects of snowman building, so I asked him to teach me to build my first snowman!

Because we only had a couple inches of snow on the ground, we used the snow on our cars to form the snowman parts which we then assembled by our window.

We added a scarf, a carrot, a few coals for buttons and eyes, and Andrew added the his hippy wig from Halloween. We decided it looked better bald.

The wig looks much better on Andrew, doesn't it?

It was fun building the snowman, but I think I'll stick to cookie snowmen from now on. They are easier to make, and I get to stay warm and dry.