Holiday Fun.....

....With Cooking!

12-13-09 Disclaimer: If you are hungry, looking at this post may cause anger! ( This is for you Colton!)

Let me just start out with this: This year I have loved cooking! I don't know what changed exactly but this year I have really wanted to broaden my horizons in the kitchen. I made my very first pie from scratch, dutch apple, and I thought it was pretty darn good. Mom taught me how to make bread, at my request. Now let me just say that homemade bread is so D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S! I am so happy that I can make it now. And I actually haven't bought a loaf of bread since October. I have bought lots more flour bread dough rising than ever before though!

My loaves of bread, fresh from the oven

I also had my first canning experience besides corn. I went home in October for like 3 days or so and I learned how to make bread and then Dad helped me can beans and apples. Peeling the apples was quite the chore but having homemade apple pie filling is worth it! Then because I'm baking bread more I've just experimented with the leftover dough and I've made cinnamon rolls and just plain rolls. This may not seem like a big deal to those of you who've been cooking for a long time but I'm just happy I'm learning more. Then with the holidays here I've been experimenting more!

I work with one lady every Friday and Saturday and we've been pretty bored lately, so we look up recipes and then try them out. We were looking at Christmas candy and so we both tried to make a easy toffee recipe. We tried different ones and I'm sad to say that I made mine twice and they were disasters-I thought! But third time's the charm so I gave it one more try and it worked much better.

It was interesting because you use saltine crackers to make the toffee but it is tasty! After that I've been doing other experiments for Christmas goodie plates. I made something similar to peanut butter balls and then tried Oreo balls. The other day I discovered the Pioneerwoman blog that Kiersty loves and I found a recipe on there that looked amazing. So, since I made bread tonight and had leftover dough, I made it. It's called Monkey Muffins or something like that, we used to make Monkey Bread when we were growing up and that stuff was awesome so... I made them and they're pretty amazing, I had to to sample one tonight just to make sure they were okay! I've also found plenty of other recipes that look amazing on that blog that I'm definitely looking forward to trying. I'll let you know how those turn out!

This is the Monkey Muffins, they look so yummy!