december is for baking (cakes and cookies)

December was a big baking month for me. Here’s a recap!

Birthday Cake #1 for my friend, Laura:

This is a yellow cake with raspberry and cream filling and a milk chocolate frosting. The flowers are sugar flowers I got at the local cake decorating store – I can’t make these by hand. I could maybe learn someday, but in the meantime, I just buy them.

Birthday Cake #2 for Alyssa:

Alyssa didn’t have a themed party this year, so I was off the hook for making a crazy decorated cake. I almost forgot how to decorate a “normal” cake. Again with the sugar flowers, I thought they made a nice tone on tone decoration with the little white balls of sugar (I got those from a swap from someone in another country, so I’m not sure what they’re called). This is a red velvet cake with traditional cooked flour frosting. These two cakes were made within a day of each other! Phew.

And now, for cookies and chocolate covered things:

I baked three kinds of cookies this year: (L-R) snickerdoodles, shortbread with vanilla icing and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies. I also made some “mock thin mints” out of Ritz crackers covered in chocolate (with peppermint extract) and Andes mints on top but I didn’t take a picture of those for some reason.

I also made chocolate covered mini ritz bits again. Last year I did the mini smores (ritz bits with chocolate) and the peanut butter ritz buts, but I did all peanut butter ones this year, since they taste better with the salty-sweet combination.

And that’s the jist of my December baking. Holy god. And yet, I bought chocolate things that were on sale for the holidays since I already have some ideas for some other cookies I want to try. And I thought I would get sick of baking… sheesh.

I actually meant to post this on my other blog, and now I’m too lazy to go and fix it, so you guys get to read it here. How nice. I leave you with this:

I am not good at icing cookies. Happy holidays!