Candy, Cookies and Best Friends

There's nothing like time spent with your best girl friend!  Stephen is in West Plains visiting his parents, so I've been staying with the Guenthers to get in some extra girl friend time.  Terisa went to work early so she could come home early and we could get started on Christmas treats.  
Last night's cooled strawberry cake was the foundation for cake balls!  Love those little sweet morsels of goodness.  

Also on the agenda was "never-fail" microwave peanut brittle.  The recipe sounded too good to be true since my memory of making peanut brittle is of stirring the mixture forever while using the candy thermometer to be sure it gets to the correct "hard-ball" stage (about 305 degrees.)   In fact, the first batch proved the recipe title wrong!  Guess the old saying that the power of microwave ovens varies is true because the 4-, 4-, 2-minute recipe resulted in over cooked peanut brittle which just tasted burned.  We had enough stuff for a second batch, but the dilemma--how long to cook it?  We found some other recipes which suggested a 4-, 3-, 2-minute cooking time so we opted for that.  Success!  It really tasted amazing and is very easy.  Here's the link--same recipe works for all kinds of nuts, including cashews, almond, pecan, macadamia, etc.  Just be sure to adjust the time for your microwave!

The sugar cookie dough chilled while we made these treats and ate dinner, which was a delicious homemade chicken pot pie!  We tried the sour cream sugar cookie recipe that's been all over Facebook for the last month.  It is supposed to render very soft, not crispy sugar cookies.  Ethan and Chloe helped us cut them out (Michael took pictures, but I don't have them.)  Chloe loved adding the sprinkles after they were frosted.  They turned out cute, the dough was easy to work with, the frosting is simple, but I'm not convinced they are the best tasting sugar cookies.  

However, baking was just the medium to spend time together and that was a rousing success.  Love how God has knitted our lives together so that even though we've been apart for 5+ months, we can pick up right where we left off.