Each one is unique...

Snowflakes and fingerprints that is. Today we woke up to another snowy morning, and last night I made a double batch of Thumbprint (my new favorite) Cookies for Sean to take to the office. SO June Cleaver of me! I was suffering from a serious need to bake yesterday and thankfully Sean's mom sent me this recipe on Monday morning.

This is seriously a great, melt in your mouth, super simple cookie recipe. Chances are you probably have all the ingredients on hand. I, of course, did not and had to make an emergency trip to the store for powdered sugar. I hear it was all worth it though... Husband says "They are more popular than a guy that just won the lottery." I think thats high praise!

Preheat oven to 375 degrees.

Mix: I mixed the whole thing by hand.
½ cup butter
½ cup margarine (Didn't have this so I used butter)
½ cup brown sugar, packed
2 egg yolks (reserve whites)
1 tsp. vanilla

Mix in:
2 cups flour
½ tsp. salt

Chill the dough before rolling into SMALL balls. I stuck the dough in the freezer for about 10 minutes before making it into balls. You have to make them pretty small, I got them 5x6 on a standard cookie sheet. I doubled the recipe and got 4 cookie sheets like that. (A LOT OF COOKIES)

Use the remaining egg whites to dip your finger in and make a depression (thumbprint) in the middle of each ball. Its OK to go a little bit deep because they will puff up when they bake. I had to re-dip in egg whites each time to keep my fingers from sticking to the dough.

Bake for 6-8 minutes on an ungreased cookie sheet until they firm up or are slightly brown around the edges.

While the cookies are cooling make a simple icing with butter, milk and powdered sugar. I tried to measure to give you a start, but its one of those things you're probably going to have to feel. It should set up but not get super hard in about an hour.

I used 2Tbls. butter, 1 1/2 Tbls. Milk, a splash of vanilla, and 3/4 cup of powdered sugar. My butter was cold in the fridge so I put the milk and butter in the microwave for a few to soften it up. I think I ended up using more powdered sugar than I might have needed. because I ended up totally melting the butter.
For Sean's office, I did just plain white, and sprayed them with silver luster dust (in honor of the snow and new years) Photo taken prior to spraying with luster dust.
 

For Christmas, Sean's mom tinted it pink and green, but you can make it any color you like, of course. Since the white is kind of boring, I did three shades of green/teal for Sean and I to devour this weekend. I hear they also freeze really well, but I am pretty sure we will not be testing that theory with the cookies at our house.

This Recipe is courtesy of Sean's mom, my mother-in-law, Kay Collins and her mother, "Grandma Marie" (who I was never fortunate enough to meet.)  I have a few other Kay recipes I need to post here too, but this is a great one to start with!

Its a Texas thing!

One of our Lockard family Christmas traditions was that we always got to open ONE present on Christmas Eve. For years and years and years and years, I eagerly awaited opening that gift with anticipation for what would be inside. I am almost embarrased to admit how long it took me to realize that the package we got to open on Christmas Eve was ALWAYS pajamas. My mom would spend much time agonizing over the perfect (picture and video) perfect PJ's for us, wrap them and somehow mark them so she could hand us each a "surprise" gift on Christmas Eve. Getting Christmas PJ's is now one of my favorite Christmas traditions.

Whenever I tell people about our Christmas pajamas, without fail I get a response somewhere along the lines of... "Oh, thats neat, my ____________(friend, roommate, cousin) does that too. And they're from Texas." I don't know why it seems to be such a localized tradition, but I sure am glad I'm from Texas... because I love my Christmas PJ's.

This year, after some Christmas PJ mishaps... I pulled out 2 yards of Chrissmas-y fabric I had purchased in Texas a while back and set off making my own pair. It turns out 2 yards is not quite enough fabric to make full length PJ's for my gigantor length legs... so I made capris. And since I decided that I needed to make my own PJ's apox. 24 hours before we left town, I pulled a pair out of the back of the drawer that I never wear anymore and cut them to pieces to make a pattern. Then called my mom in desperation about how to put in an elastic waistband. For all my inexperience though, I think they turned out super super cute.

Yeah I know they don't look super Christmassy in that view, but there is no denying the holiday spirit in that fabric.

I even went hog wild and embelished the cuffs with pink satin ribbon I had laying around.

And then... as much as I love my PJ pants, I think they are even cuter because of the pink and red striped shirt I found at the store right next to JoAnns (where I had to go this AM to get elastic for the waistband.)

I am pretty sure I do not want to change out of these PJ's for the next 4 days... and perhaps longer!

Sewing Update

Mainly because I think my puppies are precious... heres a picture of them in their new custom made fleece coats. Actually, Molly's was purchased at Lands End four of five years ago, but I did make Maizey's and Murphy's a few weeks ago.

Yes, I might have intentionally picked the pink and the red so they would coordinate with Molly's existing green and be cute on our Christmas card.

I have about 500 pictures from this photo shoot, Sean's mom and sister helped me... it was kind of like herding cats, and we only ended up with maybe 5 decent ones.

Doughnuts or Donuts? I really should have done this a while ago...

I think I like the second spelling, but the first is probably "correct." Anyway, the beauty of this whole diet thing were doing is that we get saturday "off" and eat whatever, and as much of whatever we want as we can. We made donuts twice (ever) in October and the first time was a TOTAL disaster so I thought I'd post our recipe and the things we learned that made round 2 MUCH more sucessful.

All the pictures are from round 2 which happened to fall on halloween... I don't think we could survived round one if I'd been trying to take pictures at the same time.

Even though we decorated these in halloween colors they are actually Egg Nog flavored donuts and perfect for your holiday enjoyment. Before you get too excited about making these guys tomorrow. PLEASE make sure you have a candy thermometer. I did not in round one, and my idea of "winging it" was not successful. We filled our apartment with smoke, probably annoyed all of our neighbors, and had Maizey begging for her kennel for the first time in her life.

So now, here is the correct way to make donuts, or at least one sucessful method for CAKE (not yeast) donuts.

Adapted from an apple cider donut recipe. (Sean swears he hates apples and apple cider so we switched it out for egg nog)

4 T room temp butter

1 cup granuated sugar

2 large eggs

1/2 cup buttermilk

1/4 cup eggnog

3 1/2 cups flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/2 tsp ground cinnamon

1/2 tsp. salt

1/8 tsp ground nutmeg

1. In an electric mixer, beat butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

2. Add eggs, one at time until just incorporated

3. Slowly beat in the buttermilk and eggnog

4. Add the remaining dry ingredients in small increments and beat until fully incorporated. The dough will be exceptionally wet and seem unmanageable. Just stick with me (cue pictures)

5. Line a baking sheet or 9x13 pan (whatever fits in your freezer) with wax paper and spray the wax paper with PAM. Then spoon your dough onto your pan, its sticky and gross!

6. Now, spray another sheet of wax paper with PAM and cover your sticky mess of dough. Then you can take your hands and smush the dough into aprox 1/3 inch (I mean more than 1/4 inch and less than 1/2 inch)thickness. (note, if you use a 9x13 pan to fit in your freezer you might need to actually use 2 pans)

 

7. Once the dough is flattened pop it in the freezer for about 30 minutes to get nice and firm.

8. Pull your dough out of the freezer and cut into donut shapes, you can buy a donut cutter, or use 2 sizes of round cutters, which is what i did. Line another baking sheet with Pam'ed wax paper (this one only has to fit in the fridge) to lay your cut donuts on. Cover with another sprayed sheet before chilling.

9. Chill in the fridge for at least 2 hours. I did steps 1- 9 the night before we fried them up so I left them in the fridge overnight.

FRYING

I used crisco as my fry medium. Smittenkitchen says the logic behind this is it keeps your donuts less greasy at room temp... there are CERTAINLY "healthier" frying methods so if you want to go with oil do it. This is where you need the candy thermometer, and its REALLY important to keep your oil/crisco at 350* (aka fries on my thermometer).

If your oil gets too hot IT WILL smoke up your house and burn the outside of raw donuts. If your oil is too cool your donuts will cook too slowly and be gross and greasy. Just plan for some tester donuts to get your timing and temp right.

Then add one or 2 donuts to the oil and cook on one side for about a minute on one side, they will float to the top and turn golden brown as they cook. Flip and cook for an additional 30 to 60 seconds. (The handle of a wooden spoon works well to flip your donuts.) I repeat: plan for some tester donuts to get your timing and temp right. You'll want to keep the sheet of donuts in the fridge while your fying. As the dough warms up, it gets very difficult to work with. Once you get it down though, the frying goes pretty quickly and you are ready to frost and eat!

FROSTING   Some people are strong proponents of eating cake donuts plain, others wait until they are cool enough to touch, but still hot and roll them in cinnamon sugar. The Collins' however believe that if you are going to do something you need to go all the way, and we topped ours with simple glaze made from powdered sugar, milk, vanilla and chocolate for me, and orange tinted maple for Sean.

Like a lot of things I do, there is no real recipe for this... just mix your powdered sugar with milk (or heavy cream) and vanilla, or coco powder, or maple extract, or pepermint or whatever you want until you have a smooth yet runny consistency. I let ours cool totally and then dipped them in. They aren't donut shop perfect, but they were good! Note: If you love egg nog (which I don't) you could totally make a glaze with powdered sugar, and egg nog and maybe some alcoholic additives instead of milk... haven't tried it, but I think someone should!

And there you have my dissertation on donuts (err doughnuts).