Not to disappoint anyone, but I have decided that my cookie-making spree has come to an end.  Last night I was putting together some cookie trays for upcoming events and I realized that between all the cookies and chocolates and cake balls, I’m pretty well set.  To be honest, I am also tired of baking, so that is a contributing factor to my decision to stop all the baking craziness.

If you want to see the previous 9 days of cookie making, see here.

For Day 10 of the series, then, I am going to show you all pictures of the little cranberry breads I made as back-up gifts this year.  I got this idea from my mom, who used to make loads of mini breads and freeze them, so she would have readily available items to defrost and give if she had to go somewhere during the holidays that would require bringing a hostess gift, or if she forgot about a teacher or a bus driver.  I chose to make cranberry bread because it seems the most festive.  Each one is 3×5 inches, so each bread batter batch gives you 3 loaves of bread.

I hope you’ve all enjoyed reading about my holiday baking adventures as much as I’ve enjoyed writing about them! Happy Holidays!!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

You know what I love about the week before Christmas?  The way holiday decorations pop up on all the houses, in all the neighborhoods, all around the country.  I’m not sure what it is exactly – maybe it’s just the festivity of it all, maybe it reminds me of the way my dad used to decorate our house when I was growing up – but something about all those lights and lawn ornamentation just makes me giggle.

My most favorite aspect of holiday lights and decorations on neighborhood houses is when Christmas happens to throw up all over a house. You know what I mean: the one house on the street that has outdone everyone else in at least a three block radius; the house you could see from space if you had the ability to look for it from there.  I call that Christmas throw-up, and I love it.  What constitutes Christmas throw-up is largely subjective – my completely over-the-top house may not be the same as yours.  However, there is the rare occasion where everyone can agree that Christmas has thrown up on a house, and I will give you a couple of well-known examples.

• There is the Bronx Christmas House, which goes to the extreme of putting Rockettes on the roof.  Tacky, but also weirdly cool.
• There is the show Crazy Christmas Lights on TLC, which highlights some extra thrown-up-on houses.
• There is the Crazy Lights Tour, where you can see houses that have had Christmas throw up on them all over the country.

Like I said above, when I was younger my dad used to decorate our house for Christmas.  What I know now, that I did NOT know then, was that our house was a fantastic example of Christmas throw-up.  We had lights EVERYWHERE.  They were on the house.  They were on the trees.  They were on the bushes.  And then there were the light-up holiday lawn ornaments.  Santa Claus, a complete nativity, 2 giant candlesticks, and a Santa with a sleigh and 8 reindeer is what I remember – there’s a good chance I’m forgetting something.  I thought this was all normal.  When people came by to take pictures of our house with all the lights ablaze, I thought that’s JUST WHAT PEOPLE DO.  I never realized it was Christmas throw-up until I was an adult.  So I feel I might be a good judge of what constitutes being excited for the holiday, and what constitutes Christmas throw-up.

Here are a few examples of houses with nice decorations that I either took myself locally, or had a friend elsewhere in the country send to me:

In the next category are houses that Christmas hasn’t quite thrown up on, but that went a little too far.  This especially applies when you have something that blows up on the lawn.

To be clear – I don’t think any of these houses are owned by crazy people who waste electricity.  I GET IT.  And what I found as I started looking for places to take pictures was that houses like these tend to cluster together.  It’s like a “keeping up with the Joneses” thing.  And I don’t see anything wrong with that.  Especially if you have kids, who will grow up with a wonderful tradition to look back on.

Which brings me to my next grouping of photos.  These are DEFINITELY houses that Christmas threw up on.  I consider them all runners-up to the centerpiece of this post, the winner of the prize for Christmas throw-up, 2009.  (To be clear – there is no actual PRIZE.  Only fame and glory.)

This next one is actually ONE HOUSE.  But there was so much to photograph I had to split it into two pictures:

After that, I bet you’re wondering what the Christmas throw-up winner could look like.  Here it is, in all it’s glory… please note, this house also plays music for all to hear!

If anyone out there knows about even better examples of houses that Christmas threw up on, feel free to share!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Has anyone ever seen the episode of Friends where Phoebe wants to give Monica her grandmother’s recipe for “the best chocolate chip cookies” as an engagement present?  They spend the entire episode trying to work out what the recipe actually was, the original having been lost in a fire.  In the end, the recipe ends up being the Nestle Tollhouse Chocolate Chip cookie recipe – you know, the one that you can find on the back of the chocolate chip bag.  Phoebe’s grandmother had been pretending it was her very own, special recipe for all those years.

I don’t want to brag, but I’ve been told a few times that I make the best chocolate chip cookies ever.  (Did you just roll your eyes and contemplate not reading any further?!)  It’s always possible the people who have said this to me were trying to get me to help them with something at the time, but I choose to believe the comments came from the heart and were true.

I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: the recipe I use to make my chocolate chip cookies is the same recipe Phoebe’s grandmother passed off as her own – the Nestle Tollhouse recipe on the back of the bag of chocolate chips!  My only adjustment is putting parchment paper on the cookie sheets, and I’m not sure I’m convinced this makes a huge difference in the taste of the cookies… I use the parchment paper because it makes it easier to clean the cookie sheets.

Day 9 in my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series is (drum roll please): Chocolate Chip Cookies.  If you’d like to see the previous 8 days in my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series, please click here.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

2 1/4 cups flour

1 tsp baking soda

1 tsp salt

1 cup (2 sticks) butter, softened

3/4 cup granulated sugar

3/4 cup light brown sugar, packed

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 large eggs

2 cups (1 12-oz package) Nestle chocolate chips

1 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 375° F.  Combine flour, baking soda and salt in small bowl. Beat butter, granulated sugar, brown sugar and vanilla extract in large mixer bowl until creamy. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition. Gradually beat in flour mixture. Stir in morsels and nuts. Drop by rounded tablespoon onto ungreased baking sheets. Bake for 9 to 11 minutes or until golden brown. Cool on baking sheets for 2 minutes; remove to wire racks to cool completely.

Here is the photo log of the dough being made – it’s very straightforward, and I had no hiccups to share with you all, thankfully.

I got exactly 36 cookies out of this recipe, but I did donate one to Alex and E because they were so good about staying out of my way in the kitchen while I was baking.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

To see the previous 7 Days in my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series, click here.

Day 8′s cookie is the only one for which I really have no recipe to share with you.  I have a good reason (I think): I had planned to let E help make these cookies, because they are Gingerbread Men.  I figured it would be less mess, with fewer chances for a disaster, if I used cookie mix from a bag and only had to add an egg, butter, and water with E.

It went pretty well.  I used the Betty Crocker gingerbread cookie mix, which is as easy as they come.  E and I followed the directions on the bag, and then rolled the cookie dough out on the table:

Then it was time to shape the gingerbread men… women… people…

Now it was time to decorate.  I was worried that icing might be messier than a 2-year-old can handle, so we just used holiday-colored sprinkles.  E was doing a great job, until he realized the sprinkles were edible, “like on ice cream.”  Then it became one for the cookies, five for E.  I didn’t see this coming!  I don’t remember trying to eat the sprinkle decorations when I was little and helping my mom!

At any rate, the cookies came out looking fine, and they tasted good.  E was very proud that he got to tell people he made the “men cookies.”

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I recently “discovered” a very cool website called Bakerella.  They have loads of cool things to make on there, but the one that picqued my interest the most was an item called cake balls.  I had actually heard of cake balls before seeing them on Bakerella, because my mom had purchased cake balls from a bakery in Connecticut when we were looking for a place to purchase a cake for our engagement party.  They looked hard to make, so I didn’t think much about trying to make them myself… until I saw the recipe on Bakerella, which looked 100% doable!  So for Day 7 of my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series (you can view the first 6 days here), I present you with Cake Balls, based on a recipe on Bakerella’s website.

Cake Balls

1 package of store-bought cake mix

Ingredients required to make cake from the box

1 package frosting (16 oz)

1 package chocolate bark (regular or white)

wax paper

Make the cake in a 13×9 inch pan and allow the cake to cool completely.  Once cooled, crumble the cake into a large mixing bowl, then mix in the can of frosting.  Combine the cake and the frosting until the cake is thoroughly moistened.  Roll quarter-sized balls of cake and place on a cookie sheet (you should get at least 40 balls).  Chill the balls for a few hours.  When the balls are cooled, melt the chocolate according to the package instructions.  Melting a little at a time is best, since the chocolate will cool rapidly and it’s best to work with it when it’s hot.  Roll the balls in the melted chocolate with a spoon, then place the chocolate-covered cake balls on wax paper to cool.

I decided to make chocolate cake balls, so I bought chocolate cake mix and milk chocolate frosting.  I followed the directions for making a 13×9 inch cake on the box and let it cool.

Once the cake was cooled, I crumbled it up and into a large bowl.  Then I spooned the chocolate frosting onto the crumbled cake and mixed it together.  The Bakerella website said using your hands would be best, but messy, so I used my hands to mix.  They were right – very effective, but very messy!

The cake balls cooled in the refrigerator for about 4 hours.  Then it was time to finish them off with the chocolate.  I used Ghirardelli chocolate chips, because I’ve found that they melt the best and have the most gourmet taste.  This part was much easier than I thought it would be.  The directions on the bag of chocolate chips for melting worked perfectly, and using a spoon to roll the cake balls in the chocolate made the whole thing go quite smoothly.  The chocolate did cool quickly – the first one was hardened by the time I had gotten only a quarter of the way through all the balls!

I served these to some friends on Saturday night, and everyone said they were great!  They were very moist and rich, and they DO look pretty fancy on a tray full of cookies.

Stay tuned for Day 8 in the 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series: Gingerbread Men (with the aide of a little helper!).

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

I don’t usually make sugar cookies.  I usually leave that to my mother.  I don’t have the patience for rolling out the dough and cutting out shapes or any of the other fun stuff you have to do when you make sugar cookies.  But then I found this recipe for Chocolate Hazelnut Sandwiches in the December issue of Real Simple magazine and I decided the sugar cookie boycott had come to an end.  How could I NOT make cookies that involved Nutella?!

Chocolate Hazelnut Sugar Cookie Sandwiches

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour, plus more for rolling cookies

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

1 cup unsalted butter (at room temperature)

3/4 cup sugar

1 large egg

1 tsp vanilla extract

1 1/2 cups Nutella spread

confectioner’s sugar for sprinkling

In a large bowl, whisk together flour, baking soda, and salt.  Set aside.  Using an electric mixer, beat together butter and sugar until smooth.  Add the egg and beat until fluffy, about 2 minutes.  Beat in the vanilla.  With the mixer on low, gradually add in the flour mixture.  Shape into a disk and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, wrapped.  Remove from the wrap and roll the dough out to 1/4-inch thickness and cut into your desired shape with a cookie cutter.  Bake 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees F on parchment paper-lined cookie sheets.  Allow the cookies to cool, then spoon Nutella into the middle of one cookie and place another on top to form a sandwich.  Sprinkle sandwiched cookies with confectioner’s sugar.

I followed the recipe exactly to make the dough, then refrigerated my wrapped ball for around 2 hours.

When it was ready, I rolled the dough out and used my holiday cookie cutters to shape the cookies.  Make sure you make an even number of shapes so you have 2 sides for each sandwich!

Then the cookies went into the oven and cooked until golden brown – for the most part.  Because I’m not a very accomplished dough-roller, some of the cookies were thinner than others, and those ones got a little browner than the others.  Nothing burned though.

Then it was time for the fun part – adding the Nutella.  I used a teaspoon to put about a teaspoon full of the spread into the center of each cookies.  Then I pressed a second cookie on top of the Nutella to form the cookie sandwich.  When the cookies were done I dusted them with confectioner’s sugar to make them look festive.

If you’ve missed the first 5 days of my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series, you can click here to check out the other posts.  Stayed tuned for Day 6: CAKE BALLS!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

First things first: I know I am posting 2 “cookie days” today.  It’s because I fell a day behind and I’m trying to make up for it so all the recipes have made their way to you by Christmas.  If you’ve missed the previous 4 days, you can check them out here.

Day 5 was a rather ambitious recipe for me: Chocolate Truffles.  I think I read through at LEAST ten truffle recipes before I settled on this one, by Ina Garten, and felt it MIGHT be doable.  Recipes that involve nothing but chocolate have not been my friend in the past.  I know my barks (Day 1 and 2 of this project) came out nicely, but as far as I know that could have been the world’s biggest fluke!  Here’s the thing: I’ve tried my hand at making fudge for my brother 3 times in the last few years.  It NEVER works.  I have no idea what I’m doing wrong, so I like to blame it on the fact that I don’t own a candy thermometer, but it could just as easily be my lack of patience for chocolate baking.  Anyway, point of the story = me making chocolate truffles had the potential to be a complete disaster.

Chocolate Truffles

1/2 lb good bittersweet chocolate

1/2 lb good semisweet chocolate

1 cup heavy cream

1 tbsp prepared coffee

1/2 tsp good vanilla extract

confectioner’s sugar (for dusting)

cocoa powder (for dusting)

Chop the chocolate finely and place in a heat-proof mixing bowl.  Heat the cream in a small saucepan until it just boils.  Turn off the heat and allow the cream to sit for 20 seconds.  Pour the cream through a fine-meshed sieve into the bowl with the chocolate.  With a wire whisk, slowly stir the cream and chocolate together until the chocolate is completely melted.  Whisk in the coffee and vanilla.  Set the bowl aside at room temperature for 1 hour.

With 2 teaspoons, spoon round balls of chocolate mixture onto a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.  Roll each ball of chocolate in your hands to roughly make it round.  Roll in the confectioner’s sugar, cocoa powder, or both.  Store the truffles in the refrigerator, but serve them at room temperature.

The first few steps of this recipe went great.  Brought the cream to”just” boiling, poured it over the chocolate – oh, right, I once again used chocolate chips because I am lazy and avoid chopping chocolate at all costs.  I did, however, use GOOD chocolate chips (Ghirardelli) instead of a more common brand.

Melting the chocolate and mixing everything together went well, too.

Then I set it aside for an hour to set.  This is the part where I began to have issues.  After the hour went by, I got my spoons and started trying to make balls.  This did not go well at all.  The chocolate was still quite soft, and it made a mess, and nothing resembling balls of chocolate.  I dropped a few balls on the cookie sheet, became convinced the chocolate wasn’t ready yet, and stuck the bowl in the freezer.

After a few minutes, I took the bowl of chocolate out of the freezer and tried again.  That’s when I noticed the few balls I had already dropped onto my cookie sheet were firm now, and really easy to shape into balls.  A lightbulb went on over my head (I swear!).  The recipe meant to drop the chocolate on the sheet, then GO BACK and shape the balls.  Doing it this way worked well, although it was pretty messy.

When all the truffles were shaped, I rolled half of them around in a bowl of cocoa powder.  The other half got rolled around in confectioner’s sugar.  I imagine you can roll them in anything – nuts, granulated sugar, sprinkles.  Had I not been so nervous about this recipe I probably would have been more adventurous.

I’m happy with the finished truffles.  I might even be over my fear of cooking with chocolate!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Every year at Christmas, I make cookies to give away to my family and friends. Usually it’s on a small scale – a couple of kinds of cookies or cupcakes. This year, though, I have a lot more people to incorporate into my giving. Initially this freaked me out, because I had no idea how I’d get it all done. Then I realized this was an opportunity to have fun with the baking, and I began to see it as a challenge. So… I have decided to make 15 types of cookies/candy and 3 kinds of bread in the next 12 days. I will give away almost all of what I make to family and friends (I suspect some of it will disappear mysteriously overnight when little elves in my apartment get hungry). With any luck, the next 12 days will chronicle my attempt at making this happen – or else it’s going to document my horrible failure!

Christmas cookies are a tradition in my family. Every year since I can remember, my mom would start baking at least a week before Christmas, and she would make us all help her.  I learned a lot about baking from her – and I also learned a lot about how NOT to bake from her.  I remember this one time I put the sugar in with the flour and OH BOY was that the wrong thing to do.  It took a whole year for her to let me help again.

I digress.

One type of cookie that is an absolute staple in our family is the peanut butter cookie.  They are simple and delicious, and I don’t think there has ever been a holiday season without peanut butter cookies.  So it’s only natural that I include this recipe in my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies series.  If you’ve missed the first 3 days, you can check out Day One, Day Two, and Day Three when you have time!

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup sugar, plus extra for rolling

1 stick of butter, at room temperature

1 egg

1 cup smooth peanut butter

1 tsp vanilla

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp baking soda

1 1/2 cups flour

Hershey Kisses, out of the foil

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F.  Grease a cookie sheet.  In a large mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar.  Beat in the egg.  Mix in the peanut butter and vanilla until smooth and creamy.  Stir in salt, baking soda, and flour until well combined.  Roll dough into 1 inch balls and then roll in sugar.  Place on cookie sheet and flatten with a fork.  Bake for 12-15 minutes.  If desired, press a Hershey Kiss into the center of cookie while it is still warm.  Allow cookies to cool before storing.

First, one of the things this recipe (from Food Network’s website) does not tell you to do that I always do is combine the dry ingredients (flour, baking soda, and salt) in a bowl before adding them to the wet ingredients.  That looks something like this:

That said, it’s a pretty straight-forward recipe. Make sure the butter is at room temperature, or you will have major problems with creaming it!

Once the dough is ready, you roll it into balls, then roll the balls around in a bowl or sugar.  You place the rolled cookies on the cookie sheet, then press them down with a fork.  I make crosses with the fork on the cookies, but you can press them down however you like.  You can also make the balls whatever size you like, but you will have to adjust the baking time accordingly.

Once the cookies come out of the oven, you should stick your Hershey Kisses on right away, to ensure they stay put once everything cools.  I don’t like putting the Kisses on every cookie I make, because I often find I don’t actually WANT the Hershey Kiss when I want a peanut butter cookie.

The recipe above will make about 24 cookies if you make them the size I did.  Hopefully the little elves in my house will keep their hands out of the cookie jar until we get a bit closer to Christmas so I don’t have to make more!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Every year at Christmas, I make cookies to give away to my family and friends. Usually it’s on a small scale – a couple of kinds of cookies or cupcakes. This year, though, I have a lot more people to incorporate into my giving. Initially this freaked me out, because I had no idea how I’d get it all done. Then I realized this was an opportunity to have fun with the baking, and I began to see it as a challenge. So… I have decided to make 15 types of cookies/candy and 3 kinds of bread in the next 12 days. I will give away almost all of what I make to family and friends (I suspect some of it will disappear mysteriously overnight when little elves in my apartment get hungry). With any luck, the next 12 days will chronicle my attempt at making this happen – or else it’s going to document my horrible failure!

Today is Day Three of my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies Series, and I made 5 Layer Bars. I got the recipe from the Food Network website.

Since we’re still over a week away from Christmas, I’ve been trying to start this whole project with cookies and candies that will stay fresh over the next week.  Day One and Day Two are good examples of things I made with storage times in mind.  I used the same strategy for Day Three.  I decided after reading the recipe (below) that there wasn’t a whole lot that could go bad before Christmas in the 5 Layer Bars.

5 Layer Bars

1 and 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbles

1 stick of butter (1/2 cup), melted

1/2 cup chopped pecans

1 cup butterscotch chips

1 cup shredded coconut

1 cup semisweet chocolate morsels

1 (14 oz.) can sweetened condensed milk

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Place the graham cracker crumbs in a bowl and combine with the melted butter.  Press firmly into a 9×13 inch baking dish.  Sprinkle the butterscotch chips, coconut, pecans, and chocolate morsels over the graham cracker crumb crust.  Pour the sweetened condensed milk over the layers.  Bake for 30 minutes.  Allow to cool and then cut into bars.

I chose to make these bars this year because I have always been curious about how to make them.  I have an aunt who makes them most years at Christmas, but my mom never did, so I had no experience with making them myself.

I assembled all the ingredients:

Then I mixed up the butter and graham cracker crumbs – I should stop here to tell everyone that I chose to melt my stick of butter in the microwave, and managed to make it explode EVERYWHERE – to the point where Alex asked me how to clean butter off the floor and ceiling.  I have no idea how it got out of the microwave and to those locations!  Once those ingredients were ready, I made a crust out of them in my 9X13 inch pan by pressing them down and out with my fingers until they were evenly distributed in the pan and firmly packed:

Then it was time to sprinkle the other ingredients all over the crust.  Easy and quick!

Once all the different chips and nuts were in the pan, it was time for my favorite part: drizzling the sweetened condensed milk over it all!  This part took longer than I thought it would, but I think it took so long because I did a crappy  job of opening the can.  No matter, the drizzling was oddly enjoyable to me – I think it might have made me feel creative.

Then it was into the oven, and 30 minutes later I had 5 Layer Bars!  I cut them into slightly smaller bars than I normally would have so I’d have more to give away.

Do they taste good?  No idea!  Judging by the tiny pieces that broke off as I cut them, which Alex and I ate as our “taste test,” I would say yes… but we probably won’t know for sure until we start eating them closer to Christmas.

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.

Every year at Christmas, I make cookies to give away to my family and friends.  Usually it’s on a small scale – a couple of kinds of cookies or cupcakes.  This year, though, I have a lot more people to incorporate into my giving.  Initially this freaked me out, because I had no idea how I’d get it all done.  Then I realized this was an opportunity to have fun with the baking, and I began to see it as a challenge. So… I have decided to make 15 types of cookies/candy and 3 kinds of bread in the next 12 days.  I will give away almost all of what I make to family and friends (I suspect some of it will disappear mysteriously overnight when little elves in my apartment get hungry).  With any luck, the next 12 days will chronicle my attempt at making this happen – or else it’s going to document my horrible failure!

Today is Day Two of my 12 Days of Christmas Cookies Series, and I made chocolate nut bark.  I got the recipe out of the December 2009 issue of RealSimple Magazine.

I know I made peppermint bark on Day One, so it might seem like a bit of a cop-out to be making a second “bark” on Day Two.  The success of the peppermint bark has given me confidence in working with chocolate, though, so I’m doing the chocolate nut bark before I lose my nerve!

Chocolate Nut Bark

2 lbs chopped up semi-sweet chocolate

1 lb (or whatever looks good) of mixed nuts

Set up a double boiler and melt the chocolate until it is smooth.  Pour the melted chocolate on to a parchment paper-lined cookie sheet and spread it out evenly.  Cover the chocolate with the mixed nuts, pressing the nuts into the chocolate firmly.  Place the cookie sheet in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour to allow the chocolate to set.  Once cooled, break the chocolate bark into bite-sized pieces.

Once again, I used chocolate chips for the recipe.  I’m just too lazy to chop my own chocolate!  I also used sliced almonds and whole shelled pecans, but I’m pretty sure any nut would work for this recipe.

This was a really easy recipe – all I had to do was dump my bag of chocolate chips into my make-shift double boiler and stir a bit until the chocolate was smooth and shiny:

This chocolate was a bit stickier than the white chocolate was yesterday, but I still got it onto the cookie sheet and pressed the almonds and pecans down with plenty of time before it started to cool.

Now, here is something I do have to say: it took longer than an hour for the chocolate to set.  I had to leave it in the refrigerator for about two and a half hours before I was sure it was ready.  Not really a big deal, just good to know.  Then it was time to break up the sheet of chocolate bark, and according to my taste-tester, the final results are delicious!

© 2009, The Table Has Shoes (and Other Ambiguities). All rights reserved.