You're a Gem! Palentine's 2016

My free time has been in limited supply for the past two years, and given the choice between baking or blogging with it, I've chosen baking.  But a week of precious downtime means the chance to pay attention to this poor, neglected blog.  I only half remember what I baked, but it sure looked nice.

First up: Palentine's 2016.

With a yellow/gray/white colour scheme and a "you're a gem" theme, Palentine's was a lemony delight.

I spent a bit more time on decor, and mostly baked some old favourites:

Meringues:

Sugar cookies. So, so, so many sugar cookies.

Cupcakes - I think they were lemon with swiss meringue buttercream, and snickerdoodle.

 Maple cookie dough truffles - WITH BACON SALT.

 Cake. I have no idea what kind this is.

 Chocolates

 Um. Some sort of cookie.

Drinks!

Speaking of decor;

Et fin.

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.