Candy Christmas Treats

[I'm not Christian, but the people I made these gifts for celebrate the winter season on the 25th so that makes these Christmas treats.]

I love Bakerella. Soooo many awesome, beautiful treats. Sadly most of my baking attempts do not turn on as lovely looking as hers. Partially due to laziness i using my iPhone camera for everything instead of my Nikon, partially due to generally cooking failure.

But I fell in love when I saw this project - Cowgirl Cookies - Mix Things Up! I like cookies! I can bake cookies! I can put things in jars! Huzzah!



Unfortunately one thing I don't love is the American cup system of measurement. I know we all get used to the system we grow up with and I'm usually pretty tolerant of wierdnesses, but this one makes no sense to me. How are cups easier than scales? If you're using a cup to measure with (unless you're shoving stuff out of a large container) you have to use a spoon to fill it, have to keep refilling it rather than just measuring once, you have to wash it out repeatedly if you're using wet ingredients and (somehow) I always end up with flour in my shoes. It's frustrating.

So anyway, since I was making three jars and I didn't want flour everywhere, I measured the ingredients in cups for the first jar, weighed them in the scale and then wrote down the amounts. Made everything much much faster for the other two jars.

Note, if you're going to use the same method, do it properly. Do not assume that a cup of flour is the same weight as a cup of M&Ms. Unless you melt them, M&Ms do not fill all the space in the cup. Same with the chocolate chips and, to a lesser extent, the oats. Guessing won't work. I had three lovely American friends try to work out the measurements without weighing and the guesses varied from the results by as much as 50g.

I couldn't find any seasonal M&Ms, I don't think they exist in the North of England so I bought ordinary M&Ms and spent an hour separating the colours. The pecans are all in the lid space of the jar.

Sadly, my printer refused to co-operate on the labels, and these streaky results were the best I could get.

I did make a half batch of cookies with the left over ingredients, but I forgot to halve the amount of butter and ended up with very tasty, very sticky gloop. Sorry no photos of that :p

Happy Wordless Yule Wednesday

So there I am, in Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, at about 3 o'clock in the morning, looking for one thousand brown M&Ms to fill a brandy glass, or Ozzy wouldn't go on stage that night. So, Jeff Beck pops his head 'round the door, and mentions there's a little sweets shop on the edge of town. So - we go. And - it's closed. So there's me, and Keith Moon, and David Crosby, breaking into that little sweets shop, eh. Well, instead of a guard dog, they've got this bloody great big Bengal tiger. I managed to take out the tiger with a can of mace, but the shop owner and his son... that's a different story altogether. I had to beat them to death with their own shoes. Nasty business, really. But, sure enough, I got the M&Ms, and Ozzy went on stage and did a great show.