Making and Baking

Instead of a link dump, I'm finally going to post pictures of stuff that I've made, especially holiday-related stuff.

First, I made my own bows! I used this Craftster tutorial and the Paper Source and Sephora catalogs, plus a back issue of Magnet. It was very fun, and really not that hard.

Then I ordered this cool wine bottle wrapping kit from Chronicle Books for Cary so he could make the wine for his work partners look festive.

Next I started baking. I don't bake much, so there are always plenty of things to go wrong. Since the kids had a snow day Friday and Cary got the day off too, I decided to use the extra time to make homemade marshmallows, after seeing how good Emily Martin's looked. Much to my surprise they turned out really well, and are delicious plain or dipped in chocolate.

That's when things went pear-shaped. Yesterday I attempted to make Sarah's delicious sounding Kima's Melt-a-ways. The dough was extremely sticky even after chilling it for an hour, and when baked the cookies ran all over the tray. A quick back and forth on Twitter with Sarah confirmed that I had accidentally doubled the butter. Doh! I started over and the second batch turned out very well. If you want to see a pic, check over at Sarah's blog. Hers is much prettier than mine.

Now I'm making Chocolate Cheesecake Candycane bars. All was going well until the mixture wasn't puffing. Turns out, the oven wasn't on. They turned out OK, but I don't have a pic because they aren't finished yet -- I still have to glaze them.

Boy, can't wait until I have to cook a three pound tenderloin on Christmas Day.

In other handmade news, I'd been wanting to post a picture of my pinecone cheese ball.

And the beautiful duvet cover that my mom quilted for my bed.
What a lot of pictures! -- now I'm off to glaze those cheesecake bars.