Girlfriends, baking, champagne, wine - is there any better combination. Probably not. I think this is our 3rd year of getting together in my kitchen for an afternoon of baking. The first year we thought we would keep it simple and make sausage rolls, we had literally hundreds of sausage rolls. We rolled and stuffed and rolled and stuffed that by the end of the day we were ready to beat each other with our rolling pins lol. Then we realized that we had this great appetizer to take to the Christmas parties but all the parties we were going to had their own batch of sausage rolls.
Last year and this year we just did whatever suited our fancy, so there were appetizers, cookies and squares, this year lots of chocolate. A perfect addition to our champagne. Along with Lindsey, Mary Jo and Dale, Cathy joined us this year. We missed poor Sharon who is on a Disney Family vacation, but felt her there in spirit O:).
Lindsey is always our brave one making a new recipe never tried before - an almond cookie with YES chocolate in the middle they were delish.
Squares were put outside in a squirrel resistant container to cool. There were millionaire shortbread, skor bars, a peanut butter bar and still to come MJ's mom's nanaimo bars, more chocolate.
Dale made her famous Old English Pub spread, which is great for freezing and bringing out at our next get together.
Finally the squares are cooled enough and the chocolate can be added. yum yum
Nothing like our fingers in there and spreading our dough.
After baking the guys joined us for dinner. Andy came to my rescue when I realized I didn't have any ceasar salad dressing, so he just popped into the kitchen with his bevy of admiring bakers as he threw together his dressing from scratch. LOL
Dinner is in the oven. The Bakers are taking a pause for a well deserved drink, definitely not the first of the day. It always amazing how 5 women can work together in a kitchen so smoothly, one is mixing, one is cleaning, dishes were constantly being washed and dried and passed on to the next station. Doing this alone with Michael Buble playing can get a little tiring, with good friends the hours passed very quickly.
The guys entertained themselves with curling and hockey while dinner was being prepared.
Celebrating with good friends is a great way to start the Christmas Season and an added bonus this year was being able to celebrate Doug's 60th birthday.
It's hard to believe we have known each other for 29 years, what a wonderful neighbourhood we moved into in 1985 adding such richness and love to our lives. Not to mention calories......
btw our younger generation informed us that it isn't referred to as a Christmas Cookie Bake Day, what we did was actually a "Bake and Booze". :)
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