This has been my year of slowing down… giving up control… take ‘er easy, eh! That extended over into my Christmas baking. Remembering my baking days of the past…. I had lists for the grocery store… new recipes picked out from Pinterest and printed out…. days marked off the calendar for BAKING ONLY! No more.
This is how it went down this year…. the slowing down year…. I noticed that none of the five others living in this house were eating up the chunky peanut butter. This brought on the spontaneous idea of making peanut butter cookies. You know the ones… with the criss-cross fork marks. Immediately I broke out the trusted red and white checked Betty Crocker cookbook with stains and spills to tell of my love. There are plenty of spots on the peanut butter cookie page… bringing comfort to my soul. So I started making the yummy delicacy… deciding to double the recipe along the way. I was obviously absentmindedly following the recipe while visions of sugar plums danced in my head. I remembered an entire bowl of milk and white chocolate Hershey kisses left over from a party three days hitherto. I decided mid-mix to make the peanut butter cookies with the kisses in the middle. So yummy!
While all that was going on, I somehow switched which recipe I was following in Betty’s book. Bummer. I found myself looking into a bowl of WAY too much sugar and an odd amount of flour for the PB cookies. I realized I was not making German Chocolate Pinwheels…. so I set that bowl aside, stuck a sticky note over the incorrect recipe, and started the dry ingredients again. Then I didn’t have enough flour. A trip across the street to borrow flour commenced.
Fast forward five or six days… the bowl with flour and sugar is still sitting on the counter with a sticky note in it detailing the amounts of ingredients. The German cookies required far too much effort and time to continue. So today, I decided to pour over Betty’s offerings to see if any recipe called for those measurement of sugar and flour. YES! Pumpkin bars did! Two weeks ago I was in Fry’s grocery store and saw pumpkin on sale… so I bought it. My sister once told me, “If you buy what you love you’ll always have what you need!” (It was concerning scrapbooking supplies, but I have applied it to every area of my life.) Today two huge pans of pumpkin bars were created to perfection.
However, the recipe called for cream cheese frosting. I did discover a tub of said frosting in the fridge and frosted 1/2 of one pan. A third of a pan was consumed sans frosting. Another fourth was eaten with frosting. I texted my grocery-store-bound husband and asked him to pick up more frosting. Many people in North Phoenix must be making pumpkin bars with flour and sugar left over from German Chocolate Pinwheels that were supposed to be Peanut Butter Kisses….. there was no cream cheese frosting to be found. Finally arriving home with bricks of cream cheese…. that now need to be made into frosting…. that’s where we are. And we will be here until tomorrow as the Grinch that Stole Christmas just started.
How has your Christmas baking gone???
My Sister's Jar 