Decorated Sugar Cookies

It's that time of year to make the cookies for Santa. And Kirah wanted to make decorated shapes. We have several cookie cutters, but decided for decorating purposes the tree, star, candy cane, stocking, and snowflake would give us the best palate to display our creativity. 

Here our the ingredients for the cookies. I've put the recipe here before. My grandmother's sugar cookie recipe is versatile and delicious. Margarine, sugar, egg, vanilla, vinegar, flour, baking soda and a pinch of salt.
Making cookies is pretty straight forward; creaming butter and sugar together - adding rest of wet ingredients. Mixing dry together and adding to wet without over beating. Then roll out on floured surface, cut, cook and enjoy!

Whisking dry ingredients

Creaming butter and sugar

After adding dry to wet

All rolled out to begin cutting

Cookie cutters laid out

Cutting the cookies

Baking at 425 for 8 mins

Cooling on wire wracks

Ready to frost

The finished product

We decided to use Royal Icing which is made of powdered sugar and egg whites. I used meringue powder as it is easier to work with and seems safer to me to leave out of the fridge. Last time we decorated the cookies were moist and awesome. This year somehow the cookies were dry and the frosting got very hard. I assume our house was a lot dryer this year. But if you held the bit of cookie in your mouth for a moment to dissolve the frosting - they ended up tasting pretty good. But I think the final product was more about the beauty! And the time I got to spend with Kirah and her decorating skills. (some how I completely forgot to take pictures of that process...oh well - there's always next year!)

Pumpkin Bread

So ever since we carved our pumpkins and I mentioned to Kirah that we could eat almost everything a pumpkin gives us, I had to make good on my pronouncement. I successfully managed to make Honey Mustard and Buffalo pumpkin seeds and now we were set to make some pumpkin bread.

I'm not a huge fan of pumpkin pie - I usually have a little pie with my whip cream, but I LOVE pumpkin bread - I like the cake consistency of the bread and the milder taste of the spices in the bread application.

I found this recipe on a blog and completely forgot to favorite the page so I could link it here. Then I remembered when you do a google search, it shows you the pages you've been to before. Hah! Big Brother win! So here's the website; 

Kirah took a picture of the ingredients - but blogger flipped it on its side. I'm going to include it because it makes me laugh.

Teaching Kirah how to grease the pan;

I mixed my own pumpkin spice just like the blogger told me to... even grated my own nutmeg.

Kirah mixing the dry ingredients (the sore between her eyes was a run-in with the playground equipment)

The wet ingredients waiting to be mixed

Pouring dry onto wet;

Kirah mixing gently to incorporate;

Dividing into the pans;

Here is the second loaf cut and ready to enjoy;

I didn't get pictures of  the loaves in the oven or when it was cooling or when we ate it because I was preparing for Thanksgiving too - but it was delish. Try it with some orange cream cheese. Let some cream cheese soften and then zest an orange into it, whip that up and let it chill a bit. SO GOOD!