Christmas project

I wanted to start some Christmas traditions with my daughter. One of them was the gingerbread house I posted *sorry* a long time ago. Here are some other ones I wanted to do: 

Gingerbread cookies

These are a result from holding my daughter with left arm and decorating the cookies with just my right hand. Oh, and I only had white royal icing. I used leftover candy from our Gingerbread house. I'll do better next time. If your looking for a good gingerbread cookie recipe, I don't have one. I used this. 

I love that Betty Crocker. I was skeptical too. I just wanted to decorate the cookies, take some pictures. It just smelled soooo good. I had to have a bite. It was perfect. It was soft and it didn't have too much spice in it. It reminded me of when I was pregnant. I had read that ginger helps with the nausea. The only thing that helped was a gingerbread cookie from the San Francisco Street Bakery.
I'm not much for icing. I'd rather eat it plain.

.yummy.
Christmas cookies for Santa.
I traced my daughter's hands on some paper, cut it and traced it on the cookie dough. I used store bought cookie dough. It was already rolled out and flattened. I think it was Pillsbury brand. It didn't taste good, our dog Sissy loved it. But the cookies turned out great.


And what we have here is reindeer food.

Made with:

I didn't measure anything, I just went with what looked pretty.
After that, I just threw some out the front and back door. We had a thick blanket of snow.


And the last tradition, which I am probably going to need to tweak a little bit is this one.
Christmas Eve character pancakes.

It was a disaster. Note to self: Do not use whole wheat pancake mixes when using pancake molds. Oh, and don't add m&m's to it either. Do it with regular mixes.
I used these molds I bought from Williams-Sonoma on Black Friday last Thanksgiving in California. I thought it was cute.
Now I just want to throw it across the room.

The batter just gets stuck! It made me so mad. 

I even separated the M&M's to make it more Christmasy- if there such a word. But anyway, I put the candy on only the Snowflake mold. You can see it turned black! 

Here is the batter I used:


And here it is getting stuck to the mold. Yes, I sprayed it with Pam and I sprayed it real good too.

So don't be tempted to buy this mold if you see it at Williams-Sonoma. Well, you can if you want to but I hope you have better luck than I do. I actually tried it with the regular Bisquick mix, it was better, but it still got stuck. I ended up making regular pancakes. So I guess next Christmas Eve I will do regular pancakes with green and red M&M's.