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
- 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.
While returning to Virginia with our newly purchased Airstream, we needed to make a stop in Radford, Virginia for a business visit by Sam. Searching on Google Maps, I located a State Park nearby that put us 1/2 hour away from Sam’s site visit. There really wasn’t much else in the area so I guessed it would have to do.
We would have stayed longer, but the park is in fairly close proximity to Virginia Tech and fills up quickly on football weekends. We couldn’t get a spot past Thursday night. Oh well, next time. Because we definitely will be going back. 
