Last year someone asked my brother about how he and I got along while growing up. Things that come to my mind are: kicking a technicolored soccer ball between the power lines hanging above our treehouse, being chased around the living room, me forcing him to put on plays in our basement, making box forts, tree climbing, luging down the street via wagon, and making pancakes. Pancakes was a consistent thing. Matt and I used to make pancakes together every weekend. We put our aprons on over the Scooby-Doo tee shirts and tighty whities we wore to bed, then pulled a chair up to the stove and flipped incredibly sugary pancakes (see note about sugar in last post.) When responding to the "getting along" question, my brother said that I wasn't really around that much. The things that brought us together faded away at some point when I was in middle school: the time when only theatre and Xanga ran my life. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But when he said that I wasn't around, I realized that we basically ignored each other from middle school onward. At times he told me stories and I would get a glimpse of his life, but for the most part I had no idea who he had grown into.
Matt and I had two spontaneous baking sessions this Christmas. The first was for the dogs, the second was for the Falas. We know lots of dogs, so we made over three hundred of these
yam based cookies. If they had more sugar I'd eat them on the reg.
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| This broke the spoon |
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| We used the tiny cookie cutters we won in last year's Christmas crackers. |
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| The most wond-arf-ul time of the year |
I had been thinking about making some type of buche de noel to serve on Christmas at our house, but a few days before Christmas Eve Matt told me he was looking up recipes but couldn't find anything he liked, and I immediately showed him my
winter pins. He liked the
ginger bread cookie tree recipe on Martha, so we made it together. Do not do this recipe if you don't have the right cookie cutters. We retroed it using bottoms of glasses and bowls to create different sized circles then played the game of trying to stack the different sized pieces so that there is space between levels of "branches" all while creating a cone shaped tree. We used halved Dots covered in icing (to look like mini cupcakes) to decorate the tree. It survived the car ride to Uncle Mark's for the seven fish dinner without it falling apart. I don't know if anyone else ate it except for me and Matt. I liked it though.
