Merry Christmas!

It was a great Christmas in the Blue Kitchen! We had the traditional ice cream and waffles for breakfast (I wait all year to have ice cream for breakfast) and then the traditional Christmas Lasagna for dinner. It was awesome. I hope all of your Christmases were filled with great food traditions and lots of goodies, of which I ate way too many.

"Glory be to God on high, blessed are all beneath the sky."

Cookie Cutters

We just discovered the best kids toy ever - metal cookie cutters. Ever since Jacob found my ice cream bucket full of them when I was making sugar cookies this past friday, that is all he has played with. He knows what all of them are (except the moose is a giraffe and the unknown animal with hooves and ears and a tail is a hippo, though I think it might actually be a donkey). Yesterday he stretched one out and I couldn't even tell what shape it was. I carefully reshaped it and it turns out it was the ACTUAL giraffe. I am amazed at how many hours he has spent playing with these things. He lines them all up in a standing position, then he lies them all down, then they go for walks, and yesterday the camel was jumping on the couch. Today the "Man" (gingerbread man wearing a santa hat) was playing in the fischer price barn with Fillmore (the bus from Cars) and the cow from his nativity set. As part of the gift from his sunday school teacher after their Christmas program on sunday he got two plastic cookie cutters. He gave them to Daniel because they are not as fun as the metal ones, apparently. This is actually okay by me, because I think the metal ones are a little too sharp for the baby to play with. I must remember to wash them before I make cookies again, especially since they were used with the playdough. Though I don't think I will be making sugar cookies again anytime soon, maybe even never. They were an epic failure. It was so epic I don't even want to talk about it. My sister makes great sugar cookies so maybe I will just hope she makes them every Christmas.

Hippo-Donkey & Moose-Giraffe

Roast Beast

So we had a family christmas thing this past weekend. We decided that we wanted to all get together for the holidays but actually trying to do that on Christmas is nearly impossible... especially for us. We decided that we would potluck the event and my sister assigned different parts of the meal so that we wouldn't end up with only dessert. I got to do the "Main Dish" which makes sense since I was hosting and I have an oven and everyone else had a one-and-a-half-hour commute to get here. I decided to make a beautiful roast beef in the oven with my new roasting pan. I've only ever made roast beef in the slow-cooker. Our beef supplier gave us a large enough roast to feed everyone and that would be perfect for slicing. Yum. It looked amazing. So on saturday I took out my "How To Cook Everything" cookbook (a pretty good cookbook but it has no pictures) and my "Betty Crocker Cookbook" (a standard for me) to figure out how to cook a roast. Now neither book had the cut I had (Inside Round) but other then Tenderloin they were all pretty much the same. Cook at 325 for 20-22 minutes per pound. Now my roast was 1.598kg, so more kitchen math and I decided 1.5 hours would be lots to cook this thing. I preheated the oven at 3:30pm. (Dinner at 5:30). At 4:30 I realized I had forgot to put the roast in. (Dinner at 6:00). We ate all the yummy appetizers brought by my family and we were stuffed. At six we took out the roast and Jeff cut into it. Not even close to being cooked. We turned up the oven to 400 and took a food break for the boys to open some gifts and visit. (Dinner at 7:00). Well, the roast did taste delicious. And there were some potatoes and gravy to eat with it, so it wasn't too weird. In conclusion, I don't know where I went wrong, but it all started with forgetting to put the darn thing in the oven.

Crinkle Conundrum

My Betty Crocker cookbook touts the following recipe as being low-fat.
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Chocolate Crinkles

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Ingredients:

2 cups sugar

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 tsp vanilla

4 ounces unsweetened baking chocolate, melted and cooled

4 eggs

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp salt

1 cup icing sugar

Directions:

Mix all ingredients (except icing sugar) in large bowl. Cover and refrigerate 3-4 hours.

Heat oven to 350. Lightly grease baking sheets.

Roll 1 inch balls of dough in icing sugar and place 2 inches apart on baking  sheet.

Bake 10 minutes, immediately remove from baking sheet to cool on wire rack.

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I've made them a couple of times, and they are very delicious. But then this week, with my "Cookie Countdown to Christmas" newsletter I got a recipe for chocolate crinkles... The picture looked exactly like these amazing cookies my friend Shannon used to make. I didn't know that was what a chocolate crinkle was supposed to look like!

Here is Jacob offering me a bite of his chocolate crinkle in September of 2009.
Note how the cookie is flat and light brown. 

Here is the picture that was e-mailed to me.
These look like Shannon's amazing cookies. I don't know what she calls them.

So I compared the recipe to Betty Crocker - IDENTICAL except that instead of 4 ounces of chocolate melted and cooled it uses 1 cup baking cocoa. I thought "hey, that actually makes these cookies easier" and decided to make up a batch last night for a christmas party tonight. I made the dough while the boys were napping (Yes, they were both napping, it was amazing), so that I could make them once the boys were in bed.  I used baking cocoa, refrigerated for four hours, did not grease my baking pans, and baked for 10 minutes. I got about 40 cookies, and they are so chocolatey, moist, and yummy.

Want one?

So my question is... why did they turn out so weird the previous times I made them?