Festive cookies.

So I don't really have anything interesting to blog about, so I've decided to share one of my new favourite recipes. I think it's more because they are shaped cool and I get to use my cookie cutters but yeah, you can decide why you think I like them.lol.

SHORTBREAD RECIPE

Ingredients

Serves: 36

250g (2 cups) plain flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon baking powder

250g butter

125g (1/2 cup) caster sugar

Method:

Prep: 25 minutes

Cook: 15 minutes

1. Preheat oven to 160 C.

2. Sift together the flour, salt and baking powder. In a large bowl, beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy. Add the sifted dry ingredients and mix until combined together. Chill until dough is easy to handle, about 10 minutes.

3. On a lightly floured surface roll dough out to 5mm thick. Cut into desired shapes and place on ungreased baking sheets.

4. Bake in preheated oven for 10 to 15 minutes.

So yeah, it's a pretty easy recipe with lots of butter (luckily it was on special at New World!) and it's fun to make :)

ICING

Ingredients

Icing sugar

Hot water

Food colouring

Method:

1. Fill a bowl with icing sugar.

2. Carefully add drops of hot water and mix slowly. (Not too much or it will be too runny).

3. Separate icing into separate bowls.

4. Add food colouring to each bowl.

Yeah, I made this up myself.haha.

Kiwi ingenuity - use roll from
gladwrap as rolling pin.lol. 

Awesome Christmas cookie cutters!

Posing with the cookies before they go in.
I didn't let Rose make any though.

Before they go in. Yep.

Mmm.. they look good.

Lots of icing, lots of colours :)

My personalised 'O' shaped cookie.

Rose did this one. I was mad.lol.

Angels.

The best one.

'Fallen angels' - Yep Laura broke them.haha.
Nah we accidently broke one each when pulling
them out of the tray.

Didn't get a close up of the trees but
they were the best. I like these cookies :)

The stars. And a black circle?

Laura's 'L' and my 'O' and a random
'l' letter to spell out 'LOL'.

What a mess.

At least I cleaned it up.lol.

Yeah, so if you are keen to bake, these are really easy. Just beware they can break easily if you don't pick them up carefully. These cookies are fun to make (when you're not extremely tired) and they taste good too. (As long as you haven't just had a giant chocolate chip cookie.lol)

BEDD Day 9: Complete.

Setting up the Tree!

Yay! It's nearly Christmas time :) And so December means putting up the tree and all the decorations and just enjoying the holidays (well for those of us on holiday now anyway) so yeah I thought it would be cool to blog about our Christmas and the traditions we have.

Yep, so if you know me and my family you'll know that we've had our old Christmas tree since before Aimee was born. That's like 20 years! So finally Mum and Dad decided to buy a new one, and of course Rose picked it and it's so tall (like 7ft) that it nearly touches the ceiling. Anyway, I love it. I mean, it's Christmas! Who couldn't love this time of year?

New Christmas tree!

Yep, so last night when Mum and Dad brought it home, me and Rose set up the decorations ready to go on the tree. It's kind of a tradition, I guess to put them in colour co-ordinated piles. Yep, weird I know but ever since we were kids and Christmas time came around, Mum would make us put all of the decorations into colour piles and then she would put them on the tree so that there wouldn't be clumps of one red here, then clumps of gold there or whatever.haha.

Colour co-ordinated decorations.

And yep so below are some of my favourite decorations. They are photo frames which Mum bought a few years ago and put pics of all the grandchildren into them. I think it was cos' we were low on decorations and needed some new ones.lol. Yeah, I have other favourites too but they wouldn't upload properly :(

Cool photo decorations Mum
made a few years back.

Yep, and I think the next photo is a tree which we got from someone else and Mum decided to make it a Pasifika tree with the angels made out of the tapa cloth stuff and had only gold and green decorations. It's pretty cute actually. I like it.

Our 'island' tree.

And, finally there is no Christmas without the nativity set. Of course, the whole reason for Christmas is because of Jesus' birth so yeah I like this set. And it's from Jerusalem.. I think.haha. Anyway, yeah it's pretty awesome!

Our nativity set from Jerusalem :)

And yeah so this is like my 3rd post about Christmas already and it's only the 5th of December. Hm, well guess I just need to go out more this week, month etc. Ok, well bye for now.

:)

It's December!!!!!!!!!!

So yeah, if you can't tell I'm pretty much loving the fact that it's December. Because December means Christmas is just around the corner and also summer is (hopefully) coming. I should be cleaning my room but I got distracted. As usual.haha. I never learn do I?

Well, I saw on Laura's blog that she's doing this thing called Blog Every Day of December (BEDD) and since I'm not doing anything this month, well, I thought I'd join her. I may not be the most committed but I'll try, and now realising that I will be away on the 17th, 18th and 19th I feel this may not work, but hey, I'll figure something out, okay? Okay. Cool.

And yeah since December is a month of giving (well, really just Christmas but yeah whatever) I thought I'd also try to do one nice thing for someone in each day of December. (And because I'm cool I wanna name it- so it'll be called my actsofkindness) I love hearing about how people are so blessed by just little things people do for them, and to be honest, I love receiving stuff myself, so yeah why not, right? Well, I'm not too sure exactly how this is going to work but I'm thinking it'll be like me doing small things like baking for someone, or babysitting for free, or just doing stuff that they will benefit from. Yeah so my plan is to do things that will bless other people without spending all of my money (because I have none!) and yeah I hope this works. First of all, I am putting up our Christmas tree! but Rose wanted to put the star on the top so maybe I'll let her do that and yeah I guess helping at the women's BE.LOVED event tonight counts, right? So I wrote this earlier today then went to put up the tree- FAIL. Not all the parts were there so no tree up yet :( but I did help at the women's event so I guess that counts.lol. (Except for leaving slightly early before clean-up, yeah sorry people. Hey, I'm not perfect haha)

HAPPY DECEMBER!!!

(Please don't take offence or think I am trying to make myself look good by doing this act of kindness thing, but please rather take this as an opportunity to do something cool too. And in saying that, I want to make this kind of anonymous but that may change slightly on what exactly the 'act' is. If it's something I feel to share to encourage you to do the same, or whatever, please take it just as that- encouragement cos' it's something that I just thought would be cool to do in the month of giving, yeah sweet as. Thanks!)