Christmas Eve 2011

Christmas Eve… so exciting! At home, this is the evening when we open a few gifts. Some years it was gifts from grandparents, and sometimes it was gifts for/from siblings. Andrew & I were really good and didn’t open any on Christmas Eve! Part of the reason was because we were pretty busy.

We had decided to just invite two other couples over for Christmas dinner. We weren’t up to planning a big thing like we did for Thanksgiving! So a lot of Christmas Eve was spent in the kitchen, actually! Andrew wanted to try out a recipe he had for dinner rolls (they turned out so yummy!):

And I wanted to get some baking done. I hadn’t made Christmas cut-out cookies yet (I always make some of these at Christmas), and I also wanted to make some of the mint candies for our dinner guests! Then I looked at the cheesecake recipe I was planning on…and saw that it was going to be a bit time-consuming. So that needed to get started Christmas Eve as well. Needless to say, I was up later than I had anticipated.

Once Andrew got his rolls done, he made a nice fire in the living room. I didn’t get to enjoy it much from the kitchen, but it definitely helped add to the “Christmas-y” atmosphere!

Part of the reason I was up so late was because I chose to use a rather tedious way to decorate my Christmas cut-out cookies. I used Royal Icing, which is supposed to give a smooth, matte finish. The reason it’s time-consuming? First you pipe out the outlines for each area (and I was using lots of colors), and then you thin out the icing to fill those piped areas with liquid to “flood” the surface of the cookie. If you watch the video on the website I linked to above, you can watch how long it takes to do just ONE cookie! I was probably in the kitchen icing about 3 dozen cookies for 3 hours or so. We have tile floor, so my feet were pretty sore after that!

Once the cookies were done, and after I took a break to make dinner, it was back in the kitchen to make gingerbread cookies. Yes, I forgot to look at the cheesecake recipe, which calls for homemade gingerbread cookies to make the crust. *Sigh* So I only ended up making the gingerbread cookies on Christmas Eve. I figured I’d finish it up the next morning after opening presents!