Monday, November 3, 2008

Early Christmas Baking - A Family Affair

Last weekend while we were in Arizona, my mom, sisters and I decided that we would do some early Christmas baking. We spent almost all day Saturday making cookies, bars and candy. My mom did a lot of prep work ahead of time. She made some of the doughs in advance, and packed everything up, including cookie trays and all the ingredients to be brought over to my sister's house. This was a huge job in itself.
We made over a dozen different types of Christmas treats, most of the batches being tripled in size. Everything went very smoothly except for one batch of spritz cookies.
We all wore our Santa aprons that Mom made for us last year. Even the smallest helper, Madelyn wore her Santa bib. The three boys got new "Santa's helper" aprons this year too, even though the only helping they did was to sample the cookies and ingredients. However, they had a great time playing outside in Auntie Kelly's rocks, and also did a pretty good job entertaining Madelyn at times.
A picture of all the girls in their Santa aprons

My sister Kristin (on the right) was a good sport, she doesn't really like to bake but played along with us anyway.

The cookie samplers!


Grandpa was our #1 cookie sampler -- that is when he wasn't napping or watching the football game! Occasionally he'd make his way into the kitchen to see if we hand any broken cookies for him to eat. Here's proof of Miss Olivia helping Grandma, even if it was only for five minutes. She had more fun spending time playing with her cousins.
Grandma with her littlest helper, Madelyn, who's always smiling!

After Madelyn's Santa bib came off, she wore her favorite shirt - and mine!

5 comments:

Steph said...

YUM!!!!! :-) What fun - makes me want to bake something!

Anonymous said...

What an incredible display of talent and effort. Your family "takes the cake" as bakers, Sweetcakes. Thanks for sharing. MKP

Kelly said...

It was such a treat to have you in town for this! I hope that can become a tradition because it was so much fun having all the family together for it!

Love you!

Mad Queen said...

Okay, that looks like a ton of fun! LOVE LOVE LOVE the aprons! And I am amazed at the amounts of treats you turned out... HOLY MOLY. Wow. I can see why Grandpa was so tempted... yummy yum yum. I love that the cousins were more interested in running around than in baking... so great. Cousin time is the best... it does not take much to entertain them. And how can YOU have a sister who does not like to bake... that made me crack up! NO way!!

Kenosha Office Cleaning said...

Good blog post