These days

Here's a round-up of what we've been up to the past few days.

We've been dog-sitting for this cute creature:I also baked A LOT of cookies. The first baking party with SYL yielded three different cookies: chai shortbread, black and white striped cookies, and a classic sugar cookie.My observations: fresh ground cardamom will leave your kitchen smelling like cardamom for a long time; the black and white cookies were really good, but sooooo much work; and, by the time you've made all these cookies, the last thing you feel like doing is icing the sugar cookies.

The second round of baking was with Scott and Meh. They'd make sugar cookies and I brought some gingerbread. We'd planned to do this Christmas Day, but then it looked like this:Which is nice for memories, but bad for driving.

So we postponed our cookie-decorating party for a day. Here are the results:I still have more cookies left to bake for our family holiday swap. I'm making gingerbread, plus something else. Right now I'm leaning toward the chai shortbread, but we'll see. . . .

Christmas morning, I made these 90-minute cinnamon rolls. I've never had good luck with cinnamon rolls before, but these worked out great - and they really only did take 90 minutes from start to finish. I'd totally make these again.Last night we had a lovely dinner with Scott, Meh, B-hatch, Jenji, and a special visitor from the frozen lands.