We did a little baking....

We have been enjoying the past few days leading up to Christmas and spent some time baking in the kitchen and decorating with sweets!  

My mom brought one of those Gingerbread House Kits with her from the states to be a fun little project for Gavin to get to do this Christmas season.  Brooks took a few days off of work and he decided he wanted to be the one to make the house with Gavin.  They set up shop on the kitchen table and went to town.  Gavin loved it!  I read online a few weeks ago a really GOOD TIP when making Gingerbread houses--- use a hot glue gun to glue the actual house together instead of icing so that it will be more sturdy to decorate and place candies on without falling or breaking apart.  The idea worked.  Decorating the house was simple and since we usually don't eat the gingerbread cookie part anyways, it didn't affect anything.  The candy is delicious enough and Gavin had no problem eating three times as many pieces of candy as what he was putting on the house.  What a fun memory they made!   Gavin was REALLY proud of his gingerbread house and took his decorating job seriously!  We're starting to see aspects of an engineer's mind in his everyday routines.     

The morning that my parents were coming in, I couldn't sleep out of pure excitement and was up at the crack of dawn.  I decided to do a little baking and went semi overboard.  I baked a cake, made two dozen sugar cookies, and when Gavin woke up, we decided to try a recipe I had been meaning to fix for quite some time.

Now, first let me say, I love baking and enjoy decorating even more.  I used a new cookie recipe that I found here and followed ALL the tips that many of the people contributed on the site and really liked the way the cookies turned out.  A few days later, the cookies still needed to be decorated and this is where the fun began.  I tried making the icing (which is NOT buttercream icing that I'm use to) and ran into many issues.  I was calling my sister in law for help back home, who makes and decorates GORGEOUS cookies and has even started selling them, and 5 hours later all I had to show was maybe 15 cookies.  The cookies tasted great and I was pleased with the way they did turn out, but geez--- I could have decorated a 3 tier cake in less time.  Brooks kept encouraging me throughout the morning that I had nothing else to be doing and I should just enjoy decorating the cookies, so that's what I tried to do.

Speaking of cake..... one of our traditions that we've started is to make a birthday cake for Jesus since that is the real reason we celebrate Christmas.  I waited until Christmas day to decorate the cake and we had it as a dessert for dinner with some friends of ours who came over for gumbo that night!

I mentioned earlier I had found a recipe for Baked Sugar Doughnuts that I had been wanting to make for breakfast with Gavin and hadn't done it until this week.

Here's what you need:
- 1 can of biscuits (it says to use country style, but I didn't after the way our snowmen turned out last week)
- 1/3 cup sugar
- 3 tbs melted butter

Here's what you do:
- roll out the biscuits to 2 1/2 inches (I didn't necessarily "roll" rather I squashed them until they were semi flat).... don't let my roller in the picture fool you-- or the flour.  I put them both out, but didn't really need them
- use some kind of small round cutter to punch a hole out through the middle and set the center pieces aside
- submerge the biscuits and "holes" into the butter then dip into the sugar
- place onto a greased cookie sheet and bake in the oven for 12 minutes at 375 degrees.

*** I made sure to watch the biscuits cooking in the oven because I really didn't want these to burn.  I will say, the butter and sugar that coats the biscuits made it hard for me to determine if the biscuits were undercooked so I checked them by poking a toothpick through the middle.  They came out great and tasted delicious!  Next time, I'm going to cook them for even less time so they have a softer center, and not as hard of a "shell".  Did I mention that Gavin helped me with this recipe?  He literally did all the coating and dipping!  I didn't do any of it, unless there were parts of the biscuit that still needed some sugar!  Try it out, you may be surprised how much you like it-- although, we don't exactly have the option to get up early in the am and go to the local donut shop so this met that need.  I'm also scared of our deep fryer, even though last Christmas I got one that has a basket in it and everything... so that's my next goal is to make donuts the "real" way!  Enjoy!