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Settled in For Christmas
We are parked for Christmas in the most glorious spot! The tree is up, the kid are nestled all snug in their beds, and Santa received an email telling him just where to find us. Can’t wait for tomorrow!
It’s Christmas Week! Instead of sharing our normal posts, we’ve decided to mix it up and share mostly Christmas-y stuff this week. We have really made an effort to have the most awesome, mobile Christmas EVER, and so far we are doing pretty good. For one of our activities last week, we made another recipe from Real Mom Kitchen and I thought I’d share how we pulled it off in the Airstream. First off, these are super yummy. As she describes on her website, Real Mom says that sometimes she wants the taste of a sugar cookie, without all the hastle of rolling out, cutting, and then baking. These totally nailed it. They seriously taste like sugar cookies, but are much faster and easier to make. Plus, I love peppermint almost as much as I love pumpkin.
We don’t have a mixer in the Airstream. There’s just not enough room to store something that I would only use occasionally. Enter, the Blendtec. I already posted about how much I absolutely love it for smoothies and syrup, but this recipe was partly an experiment to see if I could get another use out of it.
Here’s the recipe modified for use with the Blendtec (settings in parentheses) and limited kitchen equipment.
Ingredients
- 1 cup butter, room temp
- 2 cups sugar
- 4 eggs
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 5 cups flour
- 1 tsp salt
- ½ tsp soda
- 3 crushed peppermint candy canes
Frosting
- ½ cup butter, room temp
- ½ cup shortening
- 1 tsp vanilla
- pinch of salt
- 4 cups powdered sugar
- 5 Tbsp milk
- 1 cup Hershey’s Peppermint Kisses or Bars chopped into pieces
Instructions
- In the Blendtec, cream together 1 cup butter with 2 cups sugar until fluffy. I used the “batter” setting. It got pretty thick though so keep your rubber spatula handy. Adding the eggs helps thin it back up.
- Add eggs, one at a time, mixing after each egg (pulse). Add vanilla and mix well (batter).
- In a separate bowl, combine flour, salt, and soda and whisk (by hand) to combine.
- Pour creamed mixture over flour mixture in the bowl and whisk (by hand) until just until combined adding crushed candy canes into the dough when the batter is almost combined. (My arms got tired so my awesome husband helped with this one.)
- Spread on a greased 9×13 pan (because that’s all you have). Bake at 375 degrees for 10-15 min, until light golden brown or until a toothpick comes out clean.
- Cool completely. While it’s cooling, wash out your Blendtec because you need it for the frosting.
- For frosting, combine ½ cup butter and shortening until smooth and creamy (batter). Add vanilla and salt (pulse).
- Add powdered sugar in 1-2 cup increments until combined (speed 2), then add milk & mix until smooth and spreading consistency (pulse). Spread over cooled cookie and sprinkle with the 1 cup of chopped peppermint Hershey Kisses. Cut into bars and serve.
There you have it! My kids gobbled these up and I definitely ate more than I should. Happy baking!
We’ve talked quite a bit about compound words during school. How you take two words and smash them together to make a new word. “Star” and “fish” become “starfish”. Cara has even caught on, although sometimes she makes up her own.
After spending an early evening in the French Quarter, New Orleans eating Beignets (ben-ya) and wandering around to see the architecture we were driving home in the car.
Overhead in the backseat:
Cara: Hmmmm…. You take a “been” (left hand out) and a “yah” (right hand out) and smash them together (claps her hands) to get Beignet!
And then we all laughed.
This week was a bit of a whirlwind. Gulf Island Seashore National Park, Fort Picken and Geromino’s “hotel” room, meeting new friends at a random LDS ward and being invited over for dinner, the coolest Airstream food trucks, The National Naval Aviation Museum, New Orleans, seafood, the Tabasco Sauce Factory, and finally on to Houston where we will be spending the holidays.
How was your week?
**The recipe is from Real Mom Kitchen, one of my favorite recipe sites.
I love yummy things to eat around the holidays, and I’ve never made fudge, so I thought it’d be the perfect experiment in our little Airstream Kitchen. Are we capable of making holiday goodness? Watch the video to find out!
There you have it. As far as consistency goes, I felt like it never fully set but that could be affected by the altitude? Maybe? I’ll blame it on that. And we did share it. Hopefully they didn’t die of our cooties, but they seemed pretty impressed when we showed up to our dinner invitation with homemade fudge. “You MADE this?” they said in complete awe of our awesomeness. Why yes, yes we did.