Bake-N-Blog Holiday Edition, Part 2: Party On!

OK all you bakers, today is the day to show the world your Christmas culinary creations – yes, it’s time for Bake-N-Blog Holiday Edition, Part 2! In case you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what Bake-N-Blog: Holiday Edition is about in a nutshell: Each blogger who signed up for Bake-N-Blog selected a Christmas cookie to make (from the Internet or a cookbook or an old family recipe), whipped up a batch of the cookies, taste-tested them (isn’t that the whole point of baking?!), and today everyone is blogging about their cookies. It’s a great way for everyone to try out a new recipe, and maybe some of them will be great new additions to our Christmas baking repertoires :-)

All participants are linking to their Bake-N-Blog posts at the end of this post or leaving a link in the comments section. Be sure to make the rounds and check them all out.

This time around, I’m doing my BNB post a bit differently from last year’s BNB post. That’s mainly because I was so busy chatting while I was baking that I forgot to take “in progress” pictures. Bad me! But it’s not my fault – I was baking with a couple of friends and my cousin and my cousin’s daughter and, well, you know how it is when a bunch of girls get together ;-) But this is going to work out great for YOU, because I’m going to share LOTS of recipes with you instead of just one!

So let’s get out the KitchenAids…

And let’s get baking! Starting with Chewy Lemon Snowdrops:

You had me at chewy. Or was it lemon. Either way, I had to try out these cookies because I love chewy cookies and lemon :-) Plus don’t they look pretty all dressed up in powdered sugar for Christmas? Unfortunately, they’re not as chewy as I was expecting, and they need more lemon juice to give them more lemony kick. I’m going to try this recipe for chewy lemon cookies from Patent & the Pantry.

Pistachio Christmas Ribbon Bars (I doubled the recipe & added white chocolate chips). Not my favourite,  but not too bad. I should have put the jam on thicker to give it more raspberry flavour. And using salted butter might be better (the recipe called for unsalted).

Dreamy Peanut Butter Marshmallow Squares. Fast & easy to make – only four ingredients and no baking required. Kind of on the sweet side – but then, the ingredients are butter, marshmallows, peanut butter, and butterscotch chips!

My gluten free friend Rona (she’s not gluten free, she eats gluten free food) made these Gluten Free Raspberry Coconut-Almond Bars. They’re good, but there’s a lot of coconut oil in them. Rona thinks the bottom should have been baked longer so they’d be easier to cut. She also thinks they’d be good as tarts instead of bars to eliminate the need to cut them altogether :-)

And she made gluten free Chocolate Peppermint cookies. Even non-gluten free people thought these cookies were delicious. No link for these ones, but the recipe is at the end of this post.

My cousin Lynn chose Chewy Chocolate Eatmore Bars:

And Black Forest Crinkle Cookies:

We had a small technical difficulty with the Black Forest Crinkle Cookies. You know what they say about too many cooks… yep, one of us (I’m not naming names) put three eggs in the mixer instead of two. But that’s because another one of us gave one of us a bowl with three eggs in it, so logically, one of us assumed that all three eggs were supposed to go into the batter (we doubled the recipe). We had to add some extra flour to make the batter less sticky, but we couldn’t get it to the point of being roll-able. So instead, we plopped the batter onto the cookie sheets, and they came out great anyway :-) Not sure if it was the extra egg that made the batter too thin to roll into balls, but keep it in mind if you decide to make these cookies.

Sandy made Crunchy Sesame Cookies:

And Ginger-Lemon Pinwheel Cookies:

The sesame cookies have an unexpected taste, and the pinwheels are a nice combination of flavours with the ginger & lemon. Sandy added a teaspoon (or maybe it was a tablespoon) of lemon juice to the lemon  dough to give it more lemony flavour.

And there you have it, nine recipes for the price of one :-) It was a fun day of baking, and after dividing all the cookies between us, we all have a nice selection of Christmas cookies for the holidays :-)

Here’s the recipe for the Chocolate Peppermint cookies.

Chocolate Peppermint Cookies - yield 30-36 cookies

1-1/2 cups powdered sugar
2/3 cup cocoa
2 large egg whites
1/8 tsp salt
1/2 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp peppermint extract
1/2 cup mini choc chips

1. Preheat to 350. Line cookie sheets with parchment.
2. Sift together sugar and cocoa & set aside.
3. In the bowl of electric mixer, combine egg white and salt. Set mixer speed to high and beat till soft peaks form. Add sugar-cocoa mixture, 1 Tbsp at a time, till thoroughly combined. Set speed to low. Mix in vanilla and peppermint extracts. Add chocolate chips and mix until thoroughly combined. Dough will have the consistency of thick frosting.
4. Using a small cookie scoop, shape dough into 1" mounds and drop onto prepared cookie sheets, spacing them about 2" apart. Bake till tops are shiny and faintly cracked, about 10-12 minutes. Cool completely on cookie sheets placed on wire racks.
5. Store cookies in an airtight container for up to 5 days.

If you’re participating in BNB, leave a comment with your link and I’ll add it to the list below. Looking forward to seeing what everyone else baked :-)

1. Kate @ manningroad – Cheat’s Pudding Truffles
2. Carissa @ The Fabulous Design File – Vegan Coconut Sugar Cookies
3. Barbara @ hodge:podge – Teddy Bear Paws

Ho, Ho, Ho! Time for a Christmas giveaway!

If you’re a scrapbooker, you might already know about My Memories Suite. And if you’re a decorator or just love to design moodboards, then you need to know about My Memories Suite too! My Memories Suite is digital scrapbooking software that has all sorts of cool features that allow you to create scrapbook layouts, photo books, cards, videos, moodboards…. you name it, you can probably create it :-) Here are a couple of moodboards that I’ve  put together using My Memories:

My friend Lisa at Lisa Goulet Design has used My Memories to create some moodboards too. This is one that she designed for her new cottage.

My Memories is fun and easy to use, and there are countless ways you can set up your page either by choosing an existing template or creating your own. Upload your pictures, lay them out on the page, and then apply embellishments to really jazz things up. My Memories will even take a group of your photos and put a whole photo album together for you in less than a minute! I uploaded some of my pictures from Budapest to My Memories, selected a holiday template, and voila, photo album!This is one of the pages from the album:

Trust me, once you start using My Memories, you’ll have a hard time stopping! And guess what? Just in time for Christmas, I have a copy of My Memories Suite to give away to one of my lucky readers!

Here’s how to enter:

• Click here to check out the available digital scrapbooking kits. Then come back here and leave comment on this post telling me which kit is your favourite.

For additional entries, do any or all of the following and then leave a separate comment for each thing that you do:

• Click here to “Like” My Memories Suite on Facebook.
• Click here to follow My Memories Suite on Twitter.
• Spread the word about the giveaway on your blog, Facebook, and/or Twitter.

So that’s a total of four possible entries.

But wait, there’s more! Can’t wait to find out if you’re my giveaway winner? Need to buy a Christmas gift for the scrapbooker or decorator in your life? Then use the following code to save $10 when you buy My Memories Suite, plus receive a coupon for $10 to put towards anything from the MyMemories.com store.

Discount code:
STMMMS18291

The giveaway is open until 11:59PM on Monday, December 12th, and I’ll announce the winner on Tuesday, December 13th.

And don’t forget, Wednesday, December 14th is Bake-N-Blog Holiday Edition, Part 2. Click here for all the details.

Things are going to be very festive around here next week – don’t miss out on all the fun!

Bake-N-Blog Holiday Edition, Part 2

Now that both the Canadian & American Thanksgiving festivities are over (Happy belated T-Giving to my US friends!), you know what time it is…. yep, it’s time to pull out the cookie sheets and baking dishes and whip up some Christmas cookies! And what better way to get your creative baking juices flowing than by participating in Bake-N-Blog Holiday Edition, Part 2! If you participated in last year’s holiday edition or in Staci’s instalments of the original Bake-N-Blog, you know what to do. And if you’re new to B-N-B, all you have to do is choose a Christmas cookie recipe from a cookbook or online or from your own recipe collection, bake it, and blog about it. That’s it! Well, OK, so you have to take pictures of the baking process and the final result before all the goodies get gobbled up – actually, that might be the hardest part of the whole thing!

Here’s the scoop…

1. Pick a recipe.
2. Leave a comment on this post and let me know what you’re going to bake.
3. Sometime between now and the Official Bake-N-Blog Holiday Edition Day of Wednesday, December 14th, whip up a batch of your selected cookies. Don’t forget to take pictures!
4. Write a blog post about your baking experience. Was the recipe easy or hard to follow? Did you like the results? Would you recommend the recipe to a friend?
5. On Wednesday, December 14th, upload your Bake-N-Blog post to your blog. And let the party begin! I’ll add Mr. Linky to my Bake-N-Blog party post on the morning of December 14th, and then you can link up your post and make the rounds to see what all the other participants baked.

It’s that easy! The hardest part will be deciding what to make. These are a few goodies I found over at Tastespotting, which is a great recipe resource. If you do a search for “Christmas”, you’ll get 22 pages of recipes.

   

A couple of other great recipe web sites are allrecipes.com and Epicurious. There’s definitely no shortage of buttery, sugary, decadent Christmas concoctions out there!

To make it all official and everything, here’s a button that you can add to your sidebar and link it to this post. I have no idea how to create an actual functioning button, so just add this URL as HTML link to the image: http://jaxdoesdesign.blogspot.com/2011/11/bake-n-blog-holiday-edition-part-2.html

Time to get your bake on!

Staci’s Bake-N-Blog Part 2

It’s here – Staci’s Bake-N-Blog Part 2! This time around, we’re baking cookies from a great foodie website, Tastespotting. With 169 pages of decadent & delicious cookies, it was practically impossible to choose just one. I already have three kinds of cookies, four cupcakes, chocolate cake, and pumpkin bread in the freezer, so I really didn’t need more sugar! I came across a recipe for Herb & Cheese Savoury Cookies with Balsamic Vinegar, and I had a winner!

The ingredients are pretty simple, and I had everything on hand except the fresh rosemary (I’m sure you could use dried rosemary, just add less of it).

Cookies
1 cup of flour
2 tbsp of fresh rosemary
1/4 cup of butter, cut into cubes
1/2 cup of grated Parmesan cheese
1/2 cup of sour cream
Salt and pepper

Balsamic Syrup
1 cup balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons of sugar
3 tablespoons of light flavoured honey

They’re really easy to make – all the cookie ingredients go into a food processor. First, put in the flour, rosemary, and butter and pulse until combined.

Add the parmesan and sour cream. My favourite parmesan is Reggiano, but use whichever kind you like :-)

Pulse until the dough comes together (more or less).

The dough was pretty sticky. Not sure if it was me or the recipe – I probably should have added a bit more flour, but I like to stick to the recipe the first time I try a new one.

Roll the dough into a log.

Wrap it in cling wrap and put it in the fridge for at least an hour. Because the dough was so sticky, I put some olive oil on the cling wrap to keep the dough from sticking to it.

I made the balsamic syrup, but I cooked it too long and it went hard when it cooled. I was serving the cookies with BBQ ribs, so I decided to forego the syrup – already enough sticky sauce on the ribs. But here’s the sauce, bubbling away in the pot (just ‘cause the picture is kinda cool).

The next day, I brought the dough with me to the cottage and baked the cookies there. I forgot to take a picture of the cookies before they were baked, but I cut the log into slices about 1/4” thick. I probably got about 2 dozen cookies out of the dough. Here’s the final product, ready to go out to the deck for supper:

The verdict? Everyone gave the cookies the thumbs up :-) They look crispy, but they actually came out soft. Not sure if that’s because the dough was sticky or if they’re supposed to be soft. Either way, the taste was great, and the whole plate of cookies was gone by the end of supper.

This is a really versatile recipe – you could probably use any herb(s) that you want, and I’m sure dried herbs would work fine if you don’t have fresh. And lots of cheeses would work – cheddar, monterey jack, swiss… any shredable hard cheese. Next time I make them, I’m going to try replacing some of the white flour with whole wheat flour, and the sour cream with Greek yoghurt.

If you’re looking for an easy and yummy recipe for a savoury cookie, try this one out :-) And if you’re looking for an ooey-gooey chocolate chip cookie (or pretty much any kind of cookie!), head over to Staci’s blog and check out what all the Bake-N-Blog participants have been busy baking.

Bake-N-Blog Round-up

A huge THANK YOU to everyone who participated in Wednesday’s Bake-N-Blog: Holiday Edition – BubBLeS, Nancy, Sally, Kate, Christy, Staci, Wendy, Lisa, Carissa, Shannon, PK, Marsha, Steph, Margaret, Sarah, Jill, and our token dude, Nick (with some help from Tiffany and pizza :-)

You all made B-N-B a great success, and I appreciate that you all took the time to bake & write about your recipes. I had a great time reading about and drooling over everybody’s cookies! I’m definitely going to be adding some of them to my Christmas cookie repertoire, and I just might try one or two of them out on Sunday when I get together with some friends for our annual Christmas Cookie Baking Marathon :-) Click here to see the complete list of participants. Or if you want to find out more about a particular cookie, just click the picture.

 

Top row: Spiced Toffee Chippers, Scotcheroos, Oreo Cookie Bark, Molasses Cookies, Christmas Mint Brownies, Chocolate Orangey Chocolate Chip Cookies, Chocolate Nutella Cookies, Pummies
Middle row: Chocolate Cupcake with Irish Cream Frosting, Chocolate Nutella Cookies, Vegan Spiced Molasses Cookies, Spicy Holiday Oatmeal Cookies, Chocolate Crackles
Bottom row: Chocolate Peanut Shortbread Rustica, Oatmeal Cookies with Chocolate Chunks & Pecans & Dried Cranberries, Chocolate Thumbprints with White Chocolate Ganache, Mary’s Butter Balls, Swedish Almond Wafers

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I promised that one Bake-N-Blog participant would win a little baking-related prize. When I saw these mini cake stands in HomeSense, I decided they were too freakin’ cute to not buy :-)

 

I bought one in each colour – three for my Baking Marathon friends, and one as a little thank you gift for participating in Bake-N-Blog. Random.org selected participant #2…

Nancy at Marcus Design!

Nancy, let me know which colour you’d like, and I’ll get your mini cake stand in the mail to you ASAP.

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And speaking of giveaways, don’t forget to enter my giveaway for a custom-made bracelet & earring set OR bracelet & necklace set from the lovely and talented Melanie at Me-bijoux. Click here for all the details.

Have a great weekend everyone!