Holiday baking

I really like to bake (and eat) dessert items. This year, we've had a lot of fun baking together. First, I made one of my favorite things - sugar cookies.

I actually cut them out after the kids went to bed one night. I know - not so fun for the kids, but it is so much faster and cleaner. I figured that they were going to have lots of fun decorating them the next day.

We headed over to Grandma's house and met Chris and Elaina there for some cookie decorating fun.

Everyone was quickly involved with choosing icing colors and sprinkles. Elaina was really good at icing her cookies from edge to edge while Claire wanted to get to the sprinkles as quickly as possible, so she would plop some icing in the middle of the cookie spread it around a bit and be done with it.

Andrew was having a hard time with the girls because they kept mixing the knives into the different colors of icing. He enjoyed choosing different shapes to decorate each time.

We tried giving Chris cookies to decorate, but he kept eating them, so we gave him sprinkles. Picking them up one by one to eat proved too time consuming, so he resorted to the tip and dump method. Pretty soon his face was dyed bright red by the sprinkles.

Elaina is really enjoying herself here.

My mom organizing the finished product. Many of them were heavy on the sprinkles, but isn't that the point?

The next task was caramels. These are my mom's specialty. She was making them for my dad's work, so I decided to finally learn how to do it and make them for my friends. Basically, it involves a lot of stirring to make caramels. There are only 5 ingredients, but it takes a while to get them to the correct temperature.

We made caramel sauce, plain wrapped caramels, chocolate covered and suckers. My mom definitely has this down to a science.

Grant even joined in on the fun for the chocolate dipping.

Claire had fun putting them into the papers on the plate.

She, like my mom and I, did a lot of sampling of the finished product. Apparently, Andrew does not like caramels - what??!!

I got these cute boxes at Michaels and found a cute tag on the internet. This is one that Andrew signed for his teacher.

I simply signed our names on the tag for the ones we gave to friends. The kids had fun delivering them as well.

I also fell in love with pumpkin bread again. So, I had to make a few loaves to give away so that I didn't just keep eating it myself. Claire helped me mix up the dough. She really likes to help bake. This along with all of the other goodies around are delicious, but may be quite detrimental to my diet.