Christmas Baking

Today was our annual Christmas bake day with my family.  Every year my mom, sister and sister-in-law and I get together and do our best to make our friends and families a little fatter each year.  Today we got together and made gingerbread men, sweet n salty (a yummy cereal and nut mix covered in a syrup), cherry and lemon pound cakes, lemon shortbread cookies and oreo truffles.  This year went super smoothly and we got all this baking done in just a few hours.

It was the first year we made these Oreo truffles and let me tell you, they are amazing!  They are super easy to make too.  Well, after you figure our how to dip chocolates that is.  My mom and I started on them before everyone else arrived and after two terrible rounds of attempting to melt the chocolate and ruining some perfectly amazing Bernard Callebaut chocolate we finally got our technique down.  My sister showed up in time to help me start dipping the truffles and they turned out pretty great for our first attempt.  Plus they are super yummy!

Once the truffles were done D, JH and Miss A moved on the the gingerbread while my mom worked on various other goodies.  I rolled out the dough while D and JH cut out the cookies and Miss A did the decorating and sugar sprinkling.  She did a great job and helped through almost all the cookies which is pretty impressive for a 2 year old.  Some of her decorating made us all giggle.  Particularly the "fig leaf" gingerbread men and generous sprinkling of sugar.

Some of the fig leaf gingerbread men came out a little...inappropriate.  This lead to a lot more giggling and merriment.

All in all it was a fun day, even if my tummy is a little mad at me for having too many sweets.  Here's the fruits of our labors for the day.  Hopefully everyone enjoys them as much as we enjoyed making them!