December Flashback: Baking Day!

It has slowly become a Christmas tradition to get together with a few of my friends and doing a “Christmas Baking Day Extravaganza!” We started 4 years ago with just 3 of us and have since bounced from house to house and have added a couple people. So this year we had it here (putting that 2nd kitchen to good use!) and there were 5 of us. It was crazy fun. Emphasis on the crazy part. With 5 people mixing and baking and timing and laughing and snacking it’s a lot of noise and chaos. But so. much. fun.

And the best part is at the end we divide up the goodies, so everyone gets to take home a really wonderful smattering of Christmas goodies. This year I think we counted 25 items. Although, there are a couple not pictured below… one of those was homemade egg nog that we drank there and another was Asian chicken dip that we also ate there and finally there was a M&M bar thing that didn’t get cooked enough so it was mushy in the middle.

My contributions this year were: Candy cane cookies, Short bread cookies (with the sprinkles in it), white chocolate cranberry fudge, plain chocolate fudge with pecans in it, chocolate toffee with nuts and white chocolate cranberry muffins. I didn’t like the cranberry fudge, so I won’t be making that again but the toffee was delicious and the muffins usually turn out better than they did. I made them near the end of the evening and the oven had been on for too long (we baking for about 7 hours) so it sort of scorched them. Sad day.