Christmas Cookies

I love making cut-out cookies. And I always think I'll love decorating them. These days, though, it always seems to be harder and more time-consuming than it was when I was little. And rarely do sugar cookies have the depth or interest in flavours that drop cookies do.

But Christmas is a time for decorating, and I've always liked playing around with new recipies, so I was willing to try the chocolate biscuit recipe provided in this month's cookie carnival.

Let me say, firstly, that my brothers - the main baked-goods eaters in this house - loved the chocolate cookies. And I liked them very much myself too. The cinnamon brought them alive, I think.

However, my dough was quite moist, and difficult to work with unless very cold. Still, I persevered, and even tried to get fancy with the decorating. My (slightly disapointing) results are here;








This last one is not following any of the recipes provided. Instead, it's a gingerbread recipe, one I use every year to make our gingerbread house. The dough's easy to work with, and i decided to experiment with 'glass windows'. They didn't unfortunately work quite as well as I hoped (not as clear as they have been in the past - but neither were the sweets I used). But I'm quite pleased with this landscape one.

Morocco (2)

So I can't put up more than five pictures at a time. And I'm still lazy. But here are a few more.

A nougat stall in Fes Medina - very yummy nougat too.


A dried fruit and nut stall. My introduction to the joy that is dried figs.


Homemade pastilla. This is a traditional meal made of very thin pastry, stuffed with a mixture of chicken, egg, onion and sugar, and sprinkled with icing sugar and cinnamon. It works suprisingly well. The picture below is the inside layer - don't let the colour put you off!



Finally, me in the kitchen and our homebase, trying my hand at making moroccon breakfast pancakes (or mwnm. In all honesty, that is their actuall name. Now try pronouncing it). And I was vaguelly successful. At any rate, it tasted nice.

20th Birthday Biscuits

The weather is miserable. Roll-up-in-a-blanket, sit by the fire, cup of cocoa miserable. And due to some fairly impressive insomnia last night, I am not only cold but completely exhausted. And I'm supposed to be baking a cake tonight. It doesn't have to be done tonight, but it would have made life easier. Ah well. I'll squash it in tomorrow.

I have already baked something this week (well, yesterday, so technically last week, I suppose). For the second birthday in under a week I resorted to something easy and quick. Although I wasn't terribly pleased with the outcome tastewise. I just made sugar biscuits with sugar icing, and they were a little bland. They looked quite nice though, I suppose. And I have some dough left in my fridge, so I might foist that off on the hillwalkers on Wednesday too (that's who the cake's for).

I feel I should write more, but I can't quite think straight at the moment. This week seems ridiculously busy for a last week of term...