Merry Christmas!

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday with family and friends!

This year MH was inspired to make a vegetable side dish for our holiday meals and he decided to make ratatouille. However, since traditional ratatouille is a stew served out of a giant bowl, he opted to make ratatouille a la Pixar's Ratatouille movie because the end result is much more aesthetically pleasing.

Ratatouille

It turned out to be a really tasty dish. We just wish it didn't take so long prepare, assemble, and bake!

Since I love baking for the holidays, I made a lattice top apple pie for our Christmas Eve family dinner, our traditional cinnamon rolls for breakfast Christmas day, and a banana creme pie for our Christmas day family dinner.

Apple Pie

I didn't bother snapping a picture of the cinnamon rolls or the banana cream pie since the cinnamon rolls look the same as the ones I made last year and the top of the banana cream pie was just a fluffy layer of whipped cream. I'm afraid you'll just have to take my word on it that they turned out well and were delish!

Salted Butter Caramels Fail

Caramels are one of my favorite candies and after making a salted butter caramel buttercream to go with a chocolate cake for Thanksgiving, I figured I would give making them a try. I followed the recipe as best as I could, and everything seemed to be going well until I tried to cut them into squares. The mixture hardened into a much harder candy than I had hoped and were more like a sucker/lollipop. Since they still tasted good, MH didn't want to trash them and now we have a giant caramel lollipop on our kitchen counter. Fail.

New York In December

After we punched the clock, my colleague and I caught a train into the city to check out the Christmas tree at Rockefeller center and the decorations in the department store windows.

It was a crisp, clear night which made it perfect for us to stroll through the streets and take in all of the holiday cheer. Happy Holidays to all MH and my family and friends!