When things don't go as planned . . .

It is a little yearly tradition of ours to decorate a gingerbread house after school breaks up for the holidays. Yesterday was our last day of school (for two WHOLE weeks :-), so today we got out our gingerbread house. It's usually just a bought one, I have yet to take the time to try and make my very own and glue it all together with icing. I don't even buy the house that you have to glue together, the one I get is already assembled and we just have to stick the candy to it.

I also make a little extra icing, so I got started doing that, and Kristen opened all the candy packets. THEN, we took the house out of the box . . .

 

This is the first time this has ever happened to us. At first I was going to just put it back in the box and take it back to Target (it was still in cellophane at this point but we could obviously see it was all broken. Then I realized Kristen had opened all the candy that came with it! So, I thought I would try to glue the pieces together, yeah, urmmm that idea lasted about 5 seconds. I glued one piece together with the icing I had made, but there were too many broken pieces, I really didn't feel like messing with it all.  What to do?

Ahh, yes, let's make sugar cookies instead :-)

and decorate them with the icing and candy we had from the gingerbread house!

and while we're at it, why not decorate ourselves - to look like Rudolph !!

So, our afternoon wasn't a total disaster. In fact we've had a great time, the Christmas music is playing, and I've now got Chex Mix baking in the oven. The kitchen smells delicious.

And yes, that is the same Santa Hat Kristen is wearing in the top 'header' picture when she was just 1 year old!

PW - Cookies

It's PW time :-) Did you all see her show at the weekend? She made her hubby's favorite sandwich which looked SO easy, and YUMMY! I haven't tried that yet, but I'm dying to now that I've seen her make it 'for real'. 

I didn't get a chance to share a recipe last week! I was going to show you something we'd made months ago because I hadn't made anything new during the week. I'll still share what we made months ago (and I didn't get to blog about) but, I actually made them again last week so I could see if they were ok when the correct amount of flour was used!  We made Angel Sugar Cookies - you can find the recipe on Ree's website HERE.

We made these quite a few months ago, and I made a note of what we thought ready for when I blogged about them (I just never got around to blogging about them until now!) . . . . 

I think Kristen didn’t put enough flour in these, I first gave her a half cup measure because the ‘cup’ was dirty, so she measured 2 halves in to the bowl, then I had washed the full cup measure and gave her that but I started taking her pic while she was measuring the rest and when I asked her later how many big cups she had measured, she put up two fingers!! One cup short!  Funny taste too, not sure if it’s cream of tartar or icing sugar that does that?Wouldn’t make them again!
 

They still looked good, but I said at the time I wouldn't make them again - I know there's lots of other good sugar cookie recipes out there.  I did decide to make them again though last week so I could at least see what we thought when we used enough flour. I made them while Kristen was at school!

The dough was firmer, but  they still seemed to spread alot once baked.

I didn't get a pretty picture this time around! They tasted ok, I didn't notice any 'funny taste' like before, that I thought was the cream of tartar. But I'd still not bother making this recipe again.  Over the weekend I also made apple pie using apples from our tree AND homemade icecream! I'll share that later this week with you all.