Week 3 - Day 6

I got an early start today, out the door by 9:30 am pre-snow, filled the car up with gas, got some holiday stuff at Michael's, last minute cookie ingredients, and the liquor store for some Christmas gifts.  I love the mini liquor bottles for stocking stuffers, shh don't tell!  Michael's was having a huge sale, I got some great wrapping stuff for not a lot of money.  It was great, I am pretty much done my Christmas shopping.  Just a few more little things.

I was so happy to get a bunch of Christmas cards this week, thank you all so much. My card ribbons are getting filled up I may need to put up another one.  I love getting Christmas cards in the mail.

I'm sad my class was cancelled since there was no snow in the morning, but I had a great day.  It was cookie baking central in my apartment.  Starting with my family recipe of Butter Cookies.  I tried out my cookie press and it worked really well for me.  I think they turned out really nice.

Gingerbread was next, I cut out all of the house shapes first and then cut them into the gingerbread using my pastry cutter.  I'm not convinced the butter-cream I had leftover will hold up the house enough, but I guess we will see...

Butter cookies

Gingerbread house pieces

Gingerbread cutouts

Gingerbread house (before it fell apart)

After the baking frenzy, I started getting ready to drive to my Mom's house for dinner, at that point the snow wasn't coming down that hard yet, just a light dusting.  Luckily, my Mom convinced me to pack a bag and come over asap.  Thank goodness I did, even leaving then the drive was treacherous, halfway there I wanted to turn around the roads and weather conditions were so bad.  Visibility was bad and I had to go 20 miles an hour the entire way.  It was pretty scary.  But, I kept my head, stuck to major roads, and made it to my Mom's safety.  Someone was looking out for me, I have never been so happy to arrive at a destination.

I ended up staying the night which was fun, we had pot roast, tree decorating, and a Christmas movie.  Nice and snugly while it was cold and wintry outside.

Week 3 - Day 4

Well kids, I skipped a blogging day.  Waddaya gonna do about it?  Hmm?  I thought I'd spare you the boredom of trying to come up with something witty about the series of events: woke-up, freezing, work, freezing, home, dinner, Top Chef, bed.  I know you're disappointed in missing out on the chaos that is my life.  The only thing of note that happened was I missed a phone call from my husband that I was supposed to get this morning, which I sort of did, if you count a 1 minute phone call asking me to confirm his travel arrangements.  It was incredibly formal and annoying.

Today I am tasked with baking cupcakes for our office party tomorrow.  The tricky part is timing my baking since I have a doctor's appointment right smack in the middle of the baking time.  I ended up baking the cupcakes before I left for the doctors and making the icing afterwards.  Unfortunately I completely forgot that I hadn't moved my car in several days and the de-icing task made me 20 minutes late for my appointment.

This was the only thing that went right today:

I hope these taste as delicious as they look because these may be the most perfect cupcakes I have ever baked.  These are for my office party tomorrow, I will let you know what the verdict is, but, they almost don't look homemade, so we'll see!

This has been sort of a hellish week for things going wrong, I lost my only pair of glasses and my December train pass which is too expensive to replace mid-month.

And then today, when trying to shlep five heavy bags of groceries (the majority of them filled with unsalted butter haha), and because my door is annoying and I can't open it with one hand, nor does the door stay open, when opened, and as a result, my Christmas ball wreath fell off the hook and crashed to the ground breaking 1/3 of the ornaments.

So after picking up the shards of Christmas spirit, I now have to figure out how I'm going to fix this darn thing.  Luckily most of the balls that broke, broke cleaning off, but some of them still have hot glued shards still suck on the wreath.  I have to get those off before I can add new ones.

Tomorrow needs to be better, Friday the 13th or not.