Hangin' around

The 2016 Christmas tree ornament. Don't worry if you've forgotten what the 2015 one looked like. These are the first in the series. :)

A party!

Heather Pearson invited me to join her virtual Christmas Party! Sounds like fun! Grandma Coco has definite ideas about Christmas, so ours is not the typical Canadian holiday.  Like Scrooge, we keep Christmas in our own way. One big part of Christmas in the Kingdom is cookies, and cookies are for sharing.

Here's a sampling of this year's offerings:

And here are some gift boxes of cookies that my friend Amanda and I made to sell for the Lyndhurst Feral Cat Project. We folded the boxes ourselves out of bristol board, and covered them with cellophane. It turned out to be a good fundraiser.

Since most of my cookies are used for fundraising for the cat group, cats are often the subjects. Here are some cats in ugly Christmas sweaters. My version of gingerbread men.

Too bad I couldn't offer you an actual cookie, because they taste pretty good. These cats were made from a recipe that Crosby's Molasses offered. Molasses Ginger shortbread cookies. You can find that recipe here:  http://www.crosbys.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Crosbys-The-Holiday-Book-2015.pdf

You can visit Heather's other guests here: http://www.heatherpearson.com/2015/12/needlework-tuesdays-online-christmas.html and you can join the party by posting on her page, too. Thanks for inviting me, Heather!

Merry Christmas to everyone!

One lump or two?

Having passed the first day of December on the calendar, it seems it's all full-steam ahead to Christmas. Grandma Coco is, as you might imagine, a big fan of the holiday being the party girl she is but Cheryl is harder to drag on board. We pick and choose our activities......no to shopping and crowded malls, for example, and yes to.....

Christmas sugar cubes? Really, Cheryl? Yup.

The logical next step after sugar cookies. We caught the bug. We started with ordinary store-bought sugar cubes and royal icing and graduated to the "what if?" of how do they make sugar cubes anyway? Good question.

We experimented, finally settling on a mixture of 1/2 cup granulated white sugar and 1/4 cup icing sugar. We added water 1/4 teaspoon at a time until the mixture felt like damp sand. We found a very small and shallow plastic cap and lined it with plastic wrap. We packed the sugar mixture into it and scraped it off flat. This process is a lot like playing with a bucket at the beach, minus the sunburn. We tipped the cap over and used the edge of the plastic wrap to anchor the sugar as we lifted off the cap.

We left them to dry and found they were solid! Really solid. They don't crumble at all.

Anyone for tea?