Wonderful Christmastime

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas with their loved ones, and of course filled up on lots of tasty treats! For my second Christmas post, here are some photos of treats that we enjoyed in the lead up to the big day, starting with my new favourite cookie (and that is saying a lot!). These pecan pie thumbprint cookies could not have gone wrong, with a combination of cream cheese based cookie dough, pecans and caramel, they definitely lived up to my expectations and are going to become a holiday staple in our home.

My fella and I also enjoyed baking gingerbread cookies with our son Elliott, and involving him in every step, from making the dough, to cutting the cookies out, decorating them with royal icing once they were baked, and of course eating them! Pictured is one of the ninjabread cookies that E cut out, and I decorated (though I must admit, this kid is pretty good with a piping bag).

Once Elliott got a taste of the cookies he had no more interest in doing anything except eating them, so I made these snowflake cookies from the remaining dough.

The last batch of cookies were red velvet cookies decorated with green chocolate chips. Although an excellent concept, due to the ratios of ingredients they tasted more like a regular double chocolate cookie (still yum, but deceptive with the red colour) so I may tweak the recipe a little bit if I make them again.

I also made two batches of truffles, the first being an updated version of last year's mint slice truffle, by adding a cake pop stick (this would also look amazing with a red and white striped straw) and a sprinkling of crushed candy canes. Pictured in the foreground of the photo are some Tim Tam truffles which were topped with some extra white chocolate, as well as a red mini M&M and some cut up green lollies to make it look like a mini Christmas pudding.

And lastly, since my fella has been requesting some chocolate cupcakes for far too long, I made some Corinthian Wafer Cupcakes (I'm actually not sure of the proper name for these wafer sticks, or if Corinthians are just the brand that I refer to them as, but you get the idea). These were chocolate cupcakes with dark chocolate ganache filling, a swirl of chocolate and vanilla icing, and a wafer stick garnish.