Sunday, December 17, 2006

Jenny Was a Busy Girl

Where do I start?

Friday after work we went to Houlihan's with our friends, Mark and Lauren. Then Lauren and I did the 'chick movie' by going to see Will Smith's The Pursuit of Happyness which turned out to be a very good movie. The story (based on a true story) was heart warming (very chick movie) but even better was the acting. The performances by Will Smith, his son Jaden and Thandie Newton were just amazing and had me crying a bit. Lame I know, but damn it was good acting.

On Saturday I took on the annual and huge task of making our Christmas cards. I decided a couple years back that I should do this because I drop a ton of money on craft supplies and what better way to use the supplies than to make cards. I made about 30 cards this year and even had to supplement with some store bought cards. Here's a sampling of some of my designs ...

Then in the evening (were still on Saturday) I started 5 kinds of Christmas cookies; only called Christmas cookies because Nick's fantastic mother makes them each year at Christmas. 4 of the 5 were her recipes: K-bars, Mexican Wedding Cookies, Pecan Sandies and Chocolate Thumbprints. The 5th cookie was a peanut butter cookie with the fork imprints, it was from a bagged mix. After mixing all the cookies and completing only the K-bars and peanut butter cookies I attempted to bake the Mexican wedding cookies Saturday night because the recipe did not call for chilling the dough. Well those babies did not come out well at all. They were all raw in the middle and just ick. So Nick tried to fix them by putting them back in the oven and testing as the time went on. They ended up being hard as a rock and we vowed to try again on Sunday.

Today, Sunday I gave Nick's mom a call and thought maybe we screwed up the recipe but the recipe was right and somehow I followed it and still effed up. What the hell?! After some discussions, with both Nick and his mother we figured it might be out ghetto ass oven in our rented apartment. Anyhow, I got more butter to remake the Mexican Wedding Cookies, again, as well as a oven thermometer. In summary, take two of the Mexican Wedding Cookies were a success. We think it was a combination of the light butter we bought yesterday (I noticed today, the package explicitly says "not recommended for baking or frying") and the stupid oven of ours. Damn baking all to hell, this is too hard and I have no idea how Nick's mother does it each year. Here's some Chocolate Thumbprints filled with raspberry preserves to taunt you ...

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