Merry and Bright

When I went to post about this year's Palentine's I realized that I only had two posts in 2014, which didn't seem right - I certainly felt like I did a bunch of baking last year. So, now I'm digging through old photos - first up: the dessert table from my holiday party, a green and white sugar celebration.

 
These lovely little meringues  mess with your head (they look minty, but were actually maple flavoured) - and totally worth it.

But I did make mint chocolate cupcakes:

The gingerbread variation on the cookie dough truffles might just have been better than the original.

Vanilla-Mint chocolate chip wreath cookies:

Pumpkin spice cookies

Chocolates

Like Nigella, I couldn't resist the snowflake cake pan - though I suspect I don't have the same kind of available storage that she does. Oh well - WORTH IT!

Sugar cookies - about half of the time I spent making this table was on the merry and bright cookies.  The gift tag cookies are sitting on an misshapen edible plate I made out of mints - a project to be refined and tried again. 

There were also some mint chocolate chip marshmallows - but they tasted much better than they photographed.  Oh, and then there was this sparkling white cranberry sangria - which I may still be recovering from:

Did I mention that I made the "merry and bright" glitter banner?  Because I DID.

It was a lovely, sparkly, green evening.

Hearts of Gold: Palentine's 2015

It's the most magical time of the year - Palentine's!  This February marked the 5th annual celebration of friendship and sugar (you can check out memory lane of Palentine's past here, here, and here). This year's party was a white and gold explosion - Neil Young sings I want to live, I want to give in "Heart of Gold,"  but for me, it's more I want to make, I want to bake.

First up - lemon sugar cookies.  I've been making good use out of the helvetica alphabet cookie cutters I picked up last year. 

I also made these lemon sugar cookies:

...that were inspired by the stickers made for me by Stick Em Up Labels that I put on the take-home boxes:

Pumpkin cookies:

Snickerdoodle cookie dough truffles:

Maple meringues:

Brown butter rice krispie hearts:

No-bake triple chocolate brownies (which were tasty, but didn't photograph well):

 

Carrot bundt cake, with cream cheese icing:

Devil's food cupcakes with creamy peanut butter icing:

Lemon-basil jellies (which were the belle of the ball):

Apple candies:

White chocolate hearts:

 


 I figured out how to design gold foil text...

...which I had put on these boomf marshmallows...

....to put in the salted caramel hot chocolate (!).  After last year's hot chocolate debacle which involved a lot of messy boiling-over, this year I went the crock pot route, and it was GENIUS.  I also had the gold foil image put on mugs for the hot chocolate. 

I personalized cups for other drinks....

...and made napkins:

And while I was on a personalization roll, I asked 6 by 6 Arts to adapt this awesome "We Hate Everything Together" lasercut sign into a Palentine's version - they did an awesome job, but the post office was a little rough with it, and it arrived broken.  They made me a replacement, that was bigger, and even more beautiful - the star of the display. With a little bit of glue, I rehabilitated the broken one, and put it on display in a shadow box, almost as good as new.

I spent the last few months collecting other little gold and white pieces to decorate the table and my apartment with:

Altogether:

All that glitters may not be gold, but all that's gold was sure as hell sweet this weekend.