This

is my weekend. i'm so, so, so excited. I'm leaving for prescott after I get off work at about 11:30 pm on thursday, so it's going to be crazy but so worth it to get up there and see all my lovemuffins! and then spend a wonderful weekend in jerome.

6th Day of Christmas

Hooray for being tired in spite of being sooo exhausted! I have to admit, I'm partly staying up and writing this because I wanna stay up anyways an see the lunar eclipse tonight around 1 am.

In a perfect world, I would have 4 nice, neat cookie recipes for you with step-by-step instructions and photos. Unfortunately, this is not a perfect world and I'm not about to write a million page long blog entry at 10:30 pm haha. However, I'll still give you 3 recipes (We used a mix for the gingerbread anyways- for shame!) and a recipe for royal and flood icing (and some decorating tips! although, nothing you wouldn't learn over at P-Dubs :) ). Plus, I still have lots of pretty pictures.

Lets just cut to the chase or else we'll be up all night!

First, I made the royal icing. You don't have to make it first, but I did. so I'll post it first.

I made a double batch of the following recipe. It made a lot- like 5 or 6 cups maybe. or more.

4 tbsp meringue powder (find it at a craft store like Michael's or Joann)
Scant 1/2 cup water
1 lb powder sugar, sifted
1 tsp corn syrup

Supposedly you should use your paddle attachment on your electric mixer for this recipe. I don't have a paddle attachment, so I just used my regular beaters. It worked fine, although a paddle may work faster.

Combine meringue powder and water in a mixing bowl. Beat until frothy and foamy (about a minute).
Add sifted powder sugar and corn syrup. Turn on your beater and just let it go... you want the icing to get thick enough to form stiff peaks (you should be able to dip a spoon into the icing, turn it over, wave it around, and not have any of the icing jiggle or fall). It took me about 15 min.

Then, divide icing into separate containers depending on how many colors you need. I made four colors (red, blue, green, yellow) and left some white. I used your typical grocery-store liquid food coloring, but i would recommend gel food coloring that is made for icing. You will get much deeper colors.

From the royal icing you can make flood icing (used to fill in the majority of the cookie) Do this by adding water to the royal icing 1/2-1 teaspoon at a time, mixing well after each addition until the icing is the consistency of syrup. The tip that Bridget from Bake at 350 (where I got this recipe) gives is to raise a ribbon of icing and stream it back and forth on the surface. If the ribbon disappears into the rest of the icing within a count of "one one-thousand two-one thousand", then the icing is ready. The royal icing goes into piping bags while the flood icing goes into plastic squirt bottles.

Alright. Now let's jump to the cookie recipe. I used Bridget's almond sugar cookie recipe, which you can find here. Except- my mom and I made a ridiculous triple batch of the dough because we were making half almond sugar cookie and half peppermint for a different cookie. Here are some pics from the dough making process:

yummy. you can chill your dough for later or roll it out and cut out some cookies right away. I'm pretty sure the dough ball you see above is half of what I actually made- I added about 1.5 tsp almond extract to this dough. the other half I divided in half again and then added red food coloring and 1.5 tsp peppermint extract to one of the halves (have I confused you with all the halves yet?)

After you have baked and cooled your cookies, it's time to decorate!
Royal icing in the piping bags is used for outlines.

Use flood icing to fill in the outlines- drizzle on a moderate amount (with some cookie still showing) and then use a toothpick to spread it out to all the edges. I worked on 12 cookies at one time. I did the outlines first, then the base flood, then went back around to do details. I really like how they turned out!

eek, they're so cute. haha.

but there's no time to gawk! onward, to the next recipe!

With the red peppermint cookie dough and leftover plain cookie dough I made peppermint candy canes- a tradition in my family. There's a video of my mom and sister making them when my sister was three. My dad has the camera, and I'm in the doorway only 7 months old in a little airplane chair thing that's suspended from the ceiling. it's really cute :) and even though I have no idea when or where the tradition started, I love making these cookies every year.

It's very simple. Just use the sugar cookie recipe above, but omit the almond extract. Divide the dough in half and add peppermint extract and red food coloring to one of the halves. Roll the dough into long ropes a little bit at a time- some of the white, some of the red.

Twist 5-6 inch sections of the dough together and bend into a candy cane shape.

Bake at 375 for 10-15 minutes, or until lightly golden brown.

 So cute :)

Next up is another family tradition, but this one started long before I was around. In fact, we still use the same tool that my grandma used when my mom and her sisters were little girls! I'm talking about spritz cookies. Chocolate ones.

The recipe we use is from an ooooold betty crocker cook book. It's so cute a vintagey! Check out the little drawings and faded paper:

Here's the recipe, in case you can't read the teeny tiny blurry writing:

2 sticks softened butter

2/3 cup sugar

3 egg yolks

1 tsp vanilla

2 1/2 cups flour

2 squares unsweetened baking chocolate

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Blend butter, sugar, egg yolks, and vanilla in a mixing bowl.

Melt the baking chocolate in a double boiler and add to the butter/sugar combination. Blend in flour, a cup at a time. If you own a spritz cookie maker, then follow the instructions that come with it- some degree of stuffing the dough in a tube with a thin metal shape maker at one end and pressing the dough through. If you don't have a spritz maker, I think this dough would be perfect for rolling into a log and slicing in a slice and bake manner.

Decorate with sprinkles and little candies

bake for 10-12 minutes. these are perfect for putting in little tins and giving as gifts. the little shapes are so cute!

I also made some gingerbread cookie dough out of a mix, and then my mom rolled it out and cut out some gingerbread cookies with cookie-cutters from her childhood. She also decorated them. We gave them, and almost all the other cookies to my grandma and aunt (although there is still a lot of cookie dough left over that we will use when we go to california tomorrow)

Well, there you have it. My cookie post. about 1 hour to write, 10 minutes to read, and 2 days to actually do haha. And now onto my movie post and we will be back on schedule! 

Go and check out the lunar eclipse tonight if you get a chance, it should be really cool- and the first total lunar eclipse on the winter solstice for like 300 years!

<3

Family Traditions

Well, the holidays are fast approaching (although I still think it is too early for Christmas music and decorations... that is strictly post-thanksgiving business) and it seems like everyone has at least one tradition that is special to them this time of year. I love thinking of all the fun little things my family does for the holidays, and that got me thinking about all the other family traditions we have throughout the year! I've always been a really big fan of traditions (and not much of a fan of change lol) and I hope that when I'm older and have kids of my own I can share some of the things that made my childhood so special. Here, to the best of my abilities, is a list of all the family traditions we have celebrated over the years. I don't have as many pictures as I'd like, but maybe when I go home for thanksgiving tomorrow I can scan some more.

1. Picking out a fresh Christmas tree and drinking hot apple cider while they cut off the trunk and put it on our car. Every year my Dad and Sister and I go to Watter's garden in Prescott and pick out the tallest, plumpest tree we can find. I love using a fresh tree because it makes the whole house smell like pine for a good month. The night after we get the tree, we all make hot cocoa, listen to christmas music, and decorate the tree with our box full of mismatched ornaments that we've collected throughout the years.

2. Having cozy holiday meals with way more food than is necessary (and pretty much always making the same things year after year). We used to have thanksgiving and christmas dinners just the four of us, but as Jenny and I (and other family members) have gotten older, we've started having various grandparents, aunts, and uncles join us as well. I love that every year we usually make the same dishes... and each person makes the same things haha. My Dad takes care of the turkey, my mom makes her mom's recipe of mashed potatoes (the ones I turned into a delicious Irish Colcannon dish), Jenny makes pecan pies, I make pumpkin pies and cranberry sauce, and towards the end of the day when things are getting frantic someone remembers to put the rolls in the oven, cook the stuffing, and sautee the green beans. We always use our nice white china and real silverware and drink champagne and sparkling apple cider out of "special occasion" flutes. It's just wonderful.

 3. Advent calender stockings throughout the month of December. For as long as I can remember, we have always hung a string of 24 little red stockings on our hearth on the first day of December. My parents would put a candy or two for both me and jenny for each night. It was such a fun and cute way to count down until Christmas.

4. Getting up early on Christmas morning and making my parents breakfast. Another Christmas tradition is that my sister and I always sleep in the same room on christmas eve so that we can wake each other up EARLY the next morning. When we were little kids we would get up around 4 or 5 o clock! Nowadays its more like 7 or 8 haha. after we wake up we go out into the living room to look at the tree and all the presents underneath and then we each take our stocking off of the hearth and look through the contents back in my room. Then we go out into the kitchen and put some coffee on. When we were younger we made honey scones from a children's cookbook we had, but now that we're older we make eggs and other things. Last year I made eggs benedict. yum!

5. Playing in the snow. It doesn't snow all that much in Prescott, but we usually get one or two big storms a year that can leave 6-12 inches of snow. When I was little and this happened, I would put on my blue snowsuit and play for hours. I remember making snow men and snow angels and going sledding with my Dad and then coming inside for hot chocolate :) One of the main things I remember though is snow ice cream! We always made a bowl whenever there was enough snow on the ground. It consisted of a lot of snow, some maple syrup, milk, and vanilla. Sooo yummy!

6. Tamales on Christmas Eve. This is a tradition in Mexico, and I don't know how it became a family tradition but I assume it has to do with my Dad growing up in Tucson. Sometimes we get them from a restaurant but a lot of the time we make them together a few days beforehand and then we move our table into the dining room and eat in front of the christmas tree. Delicious!

7. Making Christmas Cookies. I know everyone makes cookies around the holidays, but there are a few recipes that my mom and sister and I always try to make together. It's gotten harder in the past few years since we're both away at school until a week beforehand, but it's still a nice tradition! We make peppermint sugar cookies that are shaped like candy canes, chocolate spritz cookies with a spritz maker that looks about 50 years old and stained glass cookies (sugar cookie circles with melted lifesavers in the middle to look like stained glass windows).

8. A wild goose chase. I'm pretty sure this was my idea- my mom had this booklet of sweet little notes to put into kid's lunch boxes and I was looking through them one day. At the back was a kind of scavenger hunt called a 'wild goose chase'- basically a bunch of little rhymes that served as clues to lead to where the next rhyme was hidden and at the end was a prize. I begged my mom to let us do one for one christmas (I think I asked her about it like every day... how annoying haha) and we've done one ever since! A lot of families let their children open one present each on christmas eve, and this is how my family goes about it :)

9.Collecting Firewood. It's been a couple years since I've been free enough from school and things to do this one, but I still have many fond memories of it and hopefully I can do it again this year! One winter or fall day every year my Dad and I would drive out into the forest around prescott in his ollllld white pickup truck (sometimes we would stop at a gas station and get some pastries and cocoa first) and collect firewood. He took care of most of the big stuff, I mostly just picked up kindling and small, already broken up pieces. And when I got tired of that I'd play in the forest :) It was always so much fun and afterwards we could come home and have fires in the fireplace for the rest of the season.

10. Camping and coloring eggs on Easter. We haven't gone camping since I was 14, but it used to be a regular yearly thing. First we tent camped, and then after a few years we bought an old rv. We always go to the same campsite in Bullpen. The creek is right next to it and there's a big tree that my Dad would tie a rope and a piece of wood to to make a swing. We would all color eggs on a camper table and my parents would hide them after we went to bed so that we could look for them the next morning. So fun! A lot of these traditions have to do with religious holidays but my family isn't really crazy religious or anything... I think holidays are more about family, love, and fun times :)

11. Triple Scoops on our Birthdays. I don't know when this particular tradition started but food has always been an important thing to the Estes family. My Dad had 3 brothers and a sister so there was always a lot of food at their house. As soon as my sister and I were old enough to get excited about ice cream, my parents started taking us out for triple scoops at baskin robbins on our birthdays. It was really special and fun because cmon, who orders a triple scoop ever?! It's so tall and precarious and looks absolutely ridiculous when handed to a small child. It was always something we really looked forward to though :)

12. Traveling. I know this isn't really a tradition, but it's a very important part of my childhood. My family has always devoted time and money to be able to go new and interesting places. We've been to mexico and california many times, new england, the midwest, the northwest, and europe. I think it's so important to get out of the bubble where you live and go experience new cultures and ways of life. I hope to continue traveling for the rest of my life. The picture below is of my dad, my sister, and I in chicago. We drove there all the way from prescott, and that wasn't even the last stop! We went all the way up to Wisconsin to visit my aunt and uncle.

That's all I can remember for now. If any of my family members can remember more (because I'm sure I'm forgetting some but I'm getting too tired to keep at it haha), let me know! Also, what kind of family traditions do you cherish this time (or any time) of the year?

Happy holidays all, and I'll see you tomorrow Prescott!

Love,
Em