Oven Workout

You know it must be Christmas time when my oven is on for six hours in one day. On Monday I did a full day of Christmas baking with my old neighbour Joyce. Boy, did we ever have fun! We made a total of six things but some were very tedious. She decided to make a type of gingerbread pretzel that had to be rolled and shaped by hand. Of course they weren't doing what they were supposed to. The dough was a little too dry so they kept breaking. After an hour of fiddling with them we decided to roll out the dough and do gingerbread men instead. Now, why didn't we think of that earlier! Anyway, we ended up with Nanaimo bars, cream cheese pinwheels, Skor bars, gingerbread men & pretzels, coconut peppermint snowballs and chocolate mint brownies. I can almost feel my waistline expanding as I type this! I put everything in the freezer and hope to give a lot of it away.
Today I made "holiday bears", as Naomi calls them. This was just for the kids and is basically a shortbread recipe using a bear cookie cutter. They will decorate them tomorrow with icing, sprinkles, smarties and silver balls. Anna made Christmas cookies at school today too, so she's really baking up a storm.
Colin is in his new office now even though business doesn't officially start till January 2nd. His business name "Meerstra & Co." is on the door and things are up and running. We feel that this venture is such a blessing and I can't believe sometimes that it's actually happening. Hopefully we can post pictures soon!