Baking Queen

My plan to bake a whole mess of holiday treats this weekend wasn't deterred by the snowstorms we had for the past 72 hours. I got up nice and early Saturday, got my car from the municipal lot and did my baking shopping. Unfortunately, I forgot one thing on my list when I got back home. And also when I was taking stock of the baking supplies I already had, I assumed the bag of white stuff was flour. Guess what? After shopping, I realized that it was a big bag of sugar. Luckily, I had a bag of wheat flour so all my sweets are a bit healthier. Not bad, huh? All these recipes are from the holiday issue of Cooking Light.


I first made peppermint cheesecake brownies. Look at that picture! It looks like it comes from a mix, right? Nope! From scratch and delicious BTW.

Next, I made anise tea crescents. Unfortunately the store was out of aniseed so I just got extract. These were really easy to make, tasty and light. Though, since I was using wheat flour, as I was shaping them they looked like little turds.

Next were oatmeal toffee cookies. Again I had to substitute due to store limitations. Instead of toffee, I used butterscotch chips. I think these were my favorite. There's something fun about working with rolled oats.

Finally, I made lemon cornmeal cookies or more exactly lemon breadcrumb cookies. Yup, cornmeal is the one ingredient I forgot from my morning shopping and I wasn't going back out in the bad weather to get one item. After a quick consult with my mom, I used breadcrumbs as a substitute. These were my least favorite cookies but they did taste good and had great texture. They were a lot of work and I burnt a bunch by trying to bake two sheets at once. Grating the lemon rind was a pain and I barely got a teaspoon.

What did I do with all these treats? Well, I split them in half. One half went to my parents today and the other half will be for our family holiday. I'll probably make another batch of the oatmeal butterscotch cookies for the big family shindig on Xmas Eve.