Sometimes when my baking projects don’t quite turn out like I think they should, I make up little stories. It helps me cope. 🙂 This one was a Christmas Eve series of texts to Kayla when the bread got a bit out of control.

To set the scene: I decided to make a new recipe for what I thought was probably nissu. This recipe was for Pulla from the Scandinavia cookbook. It called for currents, but I left them out. The measurements were all in metric and I forgot I had a kitchen scale that would measure in metric, so it took a bit to figure things out.

Here’s the first picture:

This is where it started to go a little wonky. This is my biggest Pyrex bowl. Before the rise had happened… After 8 cups of flour…

This is the dough after the rise:

Also where my texts started to get a bit silly…

“After the rise, the bread overlord demanded a warm oven…”

“Too scared to disobey, I complied with haste, in hopes that it would spare the household.”

Kayla thought it was pretty funny, but she wasn’t the one being menaced by bread gone wild. The Husband was no help, he welcomes our bread overlords. 🙂

The recipe said it “served four” and I’m not sure who it thought I would be feeding. Ice giants? Trolls? It made a ton of them!

Mmmmmm….. the rolls were delicious. They are all contained now and less menacing after being frozen.

I didn’t cook a lot this week, due to the holiday, but we did have the traditional Christmas Eve meatballs. Eric and I have added buttered noodles to our tradition and I like it.

These were just beef meatballs. Since I know where to find ground venison now, we generally add that too, but I wasn’t able to get to the store. We’ll have mixed ones for the party though. We also had salad with them.

I also figured out that although the peppermint truffle filling was a failure as truffles, it makes a great ice cream sauce. We had brownie sundaes and I made mine a peppermint one.

I also used a Roasted Garlic Chicken freezer meal, which we both enjoyed. My stomach objected to something extremely violently though and I wasn’t able to eat any of the delicious leftovers. The Husband had it as leftovers and was fine, so it was just my stomach being weird, I guess.

Now for the monthly review!

Food Review:

I made 17 new recipes and used 4 new cookbooks. I used four family or my recipes. We had a good track record of eating leftovers. I did horribly at actually making breakfasts and lunches.

Hits were the peppermint sugar cookies, the garlic chicken for the Husband, stuffed Italian meatballs, the GF chocolate Orange cookies, and the Mexican Hot Chocolate Crinkles.

Misses were the garlic chicken for me, peppermint truffles, and the chewy chocolate cookies.

I’m sure I’m forgetting something, so if I figure it out, I’ll post it.

Food Goals: 

-Use the spice grinder and kitchen blow torch. 🙂

-Try to use at least one new cookbook a month.

-Make more tea blends and drink more tea!

-Use the InstantPot.

Craft Review

This month I made 4 hot pads, listed three new items on Etsy, sold 10 tea wallets, organized a little, and made two table runners. I started my Christmas skirt, but it still needs a lining and a cover for the rough zipper ends.

Craft Goals: 

– Finish two quilts from my stack of UFOs.

– Deliver the Rainbow Snowballs (When will it leave my house?!)

– Finish the second OT quilt and mail them off.

– Make a dress.

I have navy fabric ordered that has white baby dragon silhouettes and little gold crowns on it. It needs to be a sweet little dress with a gold Peter Pan collar and slightly puffed sleeves. It makes me giggle to think about it. My kids at work will love it, especially the little girls who think they are princesses. 🙂

I also really need to organize the basement and come up with a system to keep it organized. Hopefully I’ll find my serger pedal while working down there.

We’re possibly having family for the Epiphany party and want to be able to show off the whole house. The basement is a disaster from my fabric spread, the Legos, and Fancy’s proclivity for shredding cardboard. We also just found evidence that there may have been rodents nesting under the dryer at some point before we owned the house. We haven’t seen evidence of any there now, but need to get things sorted to make sure.

If you don’t hear from me by Monday night, send help… The bread overlords may have banded together with the fabric piles to take us down.

Also exciting news, my blog is almost a year old! I’ll be taking most of next week to review the good and the bad that went on this year. I’ll be splitting it up in sections, otherwise I think it would be way too long.

Let me know what you like reading about and if there are things I should change. That’s what the new year is for after all!