Cooking & Caroling Month

I love December because it is filled with baking.

We kicked off the month by making some peppermint chocolate cakes for my friend Kaari's Annual Cookie Swap. As usual, we lost, but Kevin gave me first prize in his book. He could eat these every day for weeks (and has been).


Our next baking fun came last Saturday when we baked dozens and dozens of frozen cookie dough into cookies for the local food bank. This was definitely my kind of service project. Cookies were literally baked from 11am to 8pm. The house smelled divine.

Andrew loved his job of putting the dough on the trays.


Every once in awhile he had to sample the goods.


This was the first of many rounds. My double oven definitely came in handy.


We also spent the month caroling. Andrew loves Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer so I have oversung that song this month. He also loves it when Kevin sings any Christmas song. He sits mesmerized in church when there are musical numbers or hymns. He yells at me when I try to sing, so I must be doing something wrong. :)

Last Sunday we went to our Stake's Annual Celebration of Christmas Concert. Several of the youth that I work with at church performed along with many local high school choirs and some children's choirs. The congregation also got to join in with several of the numbers.


We got the best seat in the house- on the stage at the back. We could see everything and little man tried to sing along. It was darling.


On Tuesday we baked more cookies with some of our friends. Jenny and my neighbor Sahar came over with their girls. The little guys helped roll the dough (and pound it), cut out the cookies with cookie cutters, and then decorated them once they were baked.

They surprisingly did a really good job. Andrew liked decorating more than cutting them out. The little girls were awesome with cutting and frosting.

The pic of my cousin Jenny was my favorite. Doesn't she look so cute helping the girls?...
and she's also a really good cookie froster and cookie taster :) Such a talented mom!

They all sampled more toppings than they actually put on their cookies.


I was so proud of my little man. His cookie showed that I have trained him well. It was absolutely COVERED with M&Ms.


After a fun cookie baking afternoon, I went Christmas Caroling around town with all the youth from church. It was so cute to see how excited they were about serving others. If we had let them, they would've gone caroling all night.

Our oven is now back on and the cookie baking will begin again soon so that we can take around treats to some of our friends in town. I love it!