Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, friends!

I wish you all a blessed Christmas with family and friends.

I've been busy this week with cooking, baking, candy-making, cleaning, and wrapping gifts. One of the gifts that I give to my son and daughter-in-law each year is a stack of tins filled with treats and snacks. I spend the week prior to Christmas making these goodies. Here's what is in the tins this year, from top to bottom:

• spiced nuts
• homemade cocoa mix in cellophane cones
• homemade candies -- dark chocolate dipped dried apricots and dark chocolate almond clusters
• gingerbread men, peppermint-vanilla swirl cookies, and nutty caramel bars
• cheese popcorn

I also wanted to show you the type of chocolate that I've been using for dipping dried fruits and nuts. Instead of semi-sweet chocolate chips, I've been buying "dark chocolate" chips. The brand I've been using is Great Value (Walmart store brand). They're 60% cacao and higher in fat, lower in sugar than semi-sweet chocolate chips -- so they're creamier and less sweet. The Great Value brand is about 20 cents more per package and the package is slightly smaller (10 oz compared to 12 oz semi-sweet). 

We hope to see our son and daughter-in-law tomorrow, weather-permitting. Wishing you all a merry Christmas!

recipes:

Spiced Nuts

Caramel Nutty Bars

Gingerbread Men

Peppermint-Vanilla Swirl Cookies

I've been busy with Christmas prep this week. I wanted to show you some cookies that I made, improvising one of my mother's recipes for chocolate-vanilla swirl cookies. It's a refrigerator cookie dough. You mix the dough, form into a log or block, chill, then slice and bake.

After making the basic vanilla dough, instead of making one half chocolate flavored, I added red gel food coloring and several drops of peppermint oil to the non-white batch. 

I can't say how much peppermint I used, maybe 7 drops, until I thought it tasted good and minty without being overly so.

These peppermint-vanilla swirl cookies will go into the stack of tins that I gift to my son and daughter-in-law each Christmas, as a way to share what I'm baking for the rest of the family.

I hope your week is off to a great start!