Merry Christmas, or post Christmas. It’s always nice to get days off, but I sometimes forget how much work Christmas can be. I often spend a lot of time coming up to the day figuring out and buying gifts, even though I don’t have too many people to buy for. This year it wasn’t bad at all though. Christmas Eve involves hours of baking desserts for the following day, and often late night preparing gifts and other things. Christmas involves many hours of helping prepare and serve the family dinner, and clean up afterwards. I am tired, but it mostly went well.
I baked my usual pecan tassies this year, but two separate batches with different flavors. One was cinnamon, which I tried last year to great success, though I forgot to put it in the crust, so it ended up in the filling. It wasn’t nearly as strong, so it mostly tasted like the standard tassies with just a slight cinnamon edge. The other batch was peanut butter, which I hadn’t tried before. I did peanut butter in place of some of the butter, which made for a pretty crumbly dough. They were harder to work, and I couldn’t get them as thin, so I ended up a few short of the normal number for the batch. They turned out fine though, with a nice peanut butter taste mixed with the usual pecan vanilla. They sold pretty well, unlike at Thanksgiving.
The other dessert I baked was a carrot cake, which I haven’t made in a while. I used the same recipe as last time, except I cut it in half. It was designed to be a layer cake, but I just made one layer. It turned out pretty dark, both the cake (dark brown) and the frosting (light brown instead of the usual white). It tasted fairly good, though the frosting seemed a little weird. The turbinado sugar I used in it made it a bit too gritty, since the frosting wasn’t baked. I like the texture turbinado gives when baked though. Anyway, the carrot cake didn’t sell too well. There were so many other better looking options.
Meal prep mostly went smoothly, though the turkeys (we did two smaller ones), which had been frozen, hadn’t thawed out fully and took quite a while to prepare and then longer to cook. They came out fine, and luckily the guests were a little bit late, so it all worked out. We tried a new idea for one of the turkeys: we cut it up into pieces before cooking. It made the cooking go faster, and seemed to turn out fine, though there was still a fair amount of meat left on the carcass (saved for leftovers and soup making).
The food was good. A couple of our guests were sick though, with some vomiting, which put off some of our appetites a bit. We ended up with a ton of leftovers. We sent our guests and ourselves home with plenty of food, both dinner and desserts. Tiffany had some nice styrofoam to-go style containers from her work in the food service industry, which made it easy. I don’t think I could possibly eat all of mine before they spoil, so will probably have to freeze some, and take some desserts to work.
We watched some basketball games. They all seemed to go to the less likely team.