Busy baking

Other than the occasional pan of brownies or loaf of banana bread, I don't do much baking except for around Christmas.  Do you have traditional treats that you make every year?  One year I skipped making these, and was quickly reminded that I messed with tradition. 

For my family it's a cream cheese spritz cookie that is done in the shape of a wreath, and decorated with green icing leaves and cinnamon red hots holly berries.  I baked the cookies on Wednesday.

Yesterday morning I started to decorate the cookies but things didn't work out as expected. I do not make my icing from scratch when there are perfectly good versions available in the grocery store.  But this year I bought "cookie icing", which turned out to be a gel icing which just slipped and slid right off the cookie - along with those holly berries.  This required another trip to the store. Luckily I stopped after 2 cookies because they look awful. 

The correct icing makes all the difference!  

I also have baked a couple other treats this year.  I tried 3 different kinds of gluten free goodies, so that one of my best friends could enjoy them. And one of my daughters eats mostly GF too.  The dining room table was full of containers of goodies. Some are now in the freezer so they aren't all gone before we actually get together for Christmas.  

I experimented with my spritz cookies with just a simple substitution of Cup4Cup gluten free flour.  I made them in a different shape to keep them easy to identify.  They taste OK but were a bit dry, so I made a quick almond glaze for them. Yum!! 

My daughter gave me a recipe for a Bulgarian Honey Cookie, also GF.  The recipe called for melting chocolate chips for a drizzle over them - but I just stirred the chocolate chips into them, because I didn't read the recipe close enough.  Also quite yummy.  The weird thing about the recipe is that it calls for making the dough in a food processor or blender.  Note to self - my hand mixer works much better than my blender did.

And finally I made Rice Chex clusters.  These have a peanut butter/corn syrup sticky mix to hold the clusters together.  And have a chocolate glaze on top.  These are also gluten free and very rich tasting.