Christmas is just a few short days away… Can you believe it?
While I find it amusing to spend hours upon end decorating cookies, I know that not everyone shares my love of piping bags and royal icing. I’m OK with that. If you can’t be bothered with worrying about outlining and flooding cookies or mixing up a rainbow of icing colors, then this post is for you!
You may not realize it, but Yellowdog (my yellow lab) is quite the accomplished writer.
When we were first married, we couldn’t think of anything to write in a Christmas letter to our friends and family. After hours of writing and re-writing the letter, with little to say, we ended up scrapping our version entirely. Instead, as a joke, we started writing the letter from Yellowdog’s perspective. After all, she’s part of the family, and her take on things is always more exciting than ours. We’ve been married for over 5 years now, and Yellowdog just finished writing her 6th Christmas letter!
So, today, I thought I’d let her take over and share a few of her favorite holiday tips, from the doggy perspective, of course!
I love to make a variety of cookies each year for the holidays. It’s probably no real surprise that my favorites are the ones that I get to decorate. It’s just not Christmas unless I do some cookie decorating!
I am a fan of the standard sugar cookies and gingerbread cookies, and I make them every year (including this year). But, last week I decided to spruce up my sugar cookie recipe a bit with some fun holiday flavors. I was thinking about eggnog, which naturally led to thinking about rum, which, of course, meant that I had to add some butter rum flavor to the cookies I was already in the process of mixing up. While I was at it, I threw in some spices, too.
This weekend, my younger brother got married!
Though I’ve been married for over 5 years, for some reason, knowing that my younger brother was getting married made me feel kind of old. Fortunately, since I was baking their wedding cake, I didn’t really have too much time to dwell on it!
After much deliberation, they settled on a small wedding cake with lots of cupcakes for their guests. Since I love to make cupcakes, I was thrilled… Plus (I have to be honest), it made my job a bit easier! I’ve been testing cupcake recipes for months, and the winning flavors were chocolate, vanilla, red velvet, and spice.
Since they got married in December, they chose a winter theme for the wedding, decorating with greens, berries, and lots of candles. The bride’s dress was ivory, so we went with ivory for the cake and cupcakes, as well. I made lots of small ivory gum paste flowers dusted with copper luster dust to decorate the cake and cupcakes. To match the Willow Tree cake topper, the icing on the cake was intentionally left a bit unfinished.
Today, I thought I’d take the opportunity to wish you and your family a very happy Thanksgiving! I love to cook and bake for the…
