The World According To Kate
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This post could just as easily be entitled Welcome to My Cookie Nightmare or perhaps The Great Cookie Tray of Doom, but I decided to just keep it light and simple. It’s Christmas Eve, after all, and I don’t want to sound like a total Scrooge! It’s just that after spending the last two weekends baking and eating cookies, I feel like I might actually vomit if I have to look at another one. That being said, this is a food centered blog, and I’ve taken like 8,000 pictures of cookies and other peoples’ Christmas decorations, and I would be remiss if I didn’t do some sort of holiday baking post. Also, I promised my friend Andrea that her Cookie Swap from a couple of weekends ago would make my blog. Oh, the things I’ll do for my friends… So here’s a quick photo dump of my last two weekends since I don’t really have the time to post a recipe at the moment, because, get this, I have more baking to do today! Happy Holidays, Folks!
A few photos from the Cookie Swap:
Andrea’s tree… with Christmas gifts already wrapped on December 10th. Are you kidding me? I hadn’t even started my shopping yet at that point!
Awesome tower of cookies that Andrea and her mom made – including homemade marshmallows!
The hostess with mostest. This is possibly the happiest I’ve ever seen Andrea – I think she was several drinks in at this point, so that makes sense 
Photos from last weekend – the Annual Baking Extravaganza with Mom:
I made Oatmeal Cranberry White Chip Cookies on my own before heading over to my parents’ house (yes, just about every cookie I make has oatmeal in it). They had already made four different kinds over there without me.
They were also looking pretty festive over there – pretty impressive since they just moved into the new house a few weeks ago!
The beginnings of Pecan Tassies… these cookies are the worst to make, but they’re so good to eat! I guess it’s worth it.
Here’s a picture of Dad supervising… I have a picture of mom, hard at work, too, but it’s not the most flattering photo, so I won’t post it. She actually looks kind of pissed – certainly not as happy as Andrea looks in the photo above. Clearly we hadn’t had enough to drink yet.
Actually, after all that work, I think we’ve all earned my normal Christmas Eve tradition of celebrating with a few Gin and Tonics!
Merry X-Mas from The World According to Kate!
As I’m sure you’ve heard, tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and, if you’re like most of us, you will be engaging in a gluttonous turkey fest, which will then be followed by seventeen pieces of pie, maybe some football and a long nap. It will be super healthy.
While you’ll no doubt consume a sufficient number of calories to last you through the holiday season, you should probably have a little breakfast in the morning. It is the most important meal of the day, after all. I would suggest you keep it light, but that’s just me.
Recently, I made these Vegan Whole Grain Sweet Potato Muffins, and I think they would make the perfect Thanksgiving breakfast item. They were adapted from Mark Bittman’s Sweet Potato Muffin Recipe that was featured in the November issue of Runner’s World. I decided to make them vegan, because I’m just crazy like that and enjoy the challenge. If I were to make them again, I might substitute some of the whole wheat flour for some white flour. I also made them a little lower fat by using apple sauce in place of the oil.
Bittman also suggests trying banana nut or pumpkin coconut variations if you’re not into sweet potatoes. I think the pumpkin coconut option sounds just divine, and would be great if you feel that the seventeen pieces of pumpkin pie you’ll be eating later just aren’t going to fulfill your pumpkin needs!
Ingredients:
2 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
3/4 cup sugar
2 tsps. baking powder
1 tsp. ground ginger
1/4 tsp. baking soda
1/4 cup Earth Balance buttery spread
1/4 cup apple sauce
1 cup mashed sweet potato
3 tbsps. water mixed with 2 1/2 tbsps. flax
1/2 cup almond milk
Heat oven to 375° F. Grease 12 muffin cups or add paper liners.
In large bowl, combine flour, sugar, baking powder, ginger, baking soda, and salt.
In a separate bowl, mix earth balance, apple sauce, sweet potato, flax/water mixture, and almond milk.
Fold wet mixture into the dry; and stir until just combined. Batter should be pretty thick.
Fill muffin cups three-quarters full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.
Enjoy!
Granted, the flowers normally would have been taken down over a month ago, but they were looking so great, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s funny, throughout the Summer, all of the plants on my deck were looking pretty horrible. Then, Hurricane Irene ripped through a couple of months ago, and suddenly they all came back to life and were better than ever. I even had peppers and tomatoes! I hardly had any all Summer yet I picked a couple of great ones Saturday morning just before the storm hit us. I have a feeling they’re not coming back from this though…
About Kate
A 29 year old blogger from New Britain, CT. Follow Kate in her adventures in food, drink and life!
