Saturday, December 18, 2010

Christmas is Coming.... And I'm Nowhere Near Ready

I have a whopping 3 gifts bought/ made and so many more to acquire or make or bake or whatever....
One thing I can check off my list though is my Christmas cards - well ordering them anyways.  Luckily  overnight shipping on Snapfish was the same price as standard and they are offering 25% off your card order through the new year, so I was able to get exactly the cards I wanted without having to worry about the fact that I needed them fast and I wanted a higher quality card rather than just your standard photo card.  I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the standard photo card - goodness knows I've sent them out so many times, but I just wanted the cards to be a little special since goodness knows the presents won't really be anything extravagant.  And the only reason I chose Snapfish over Shutterfly was because they are who Flickr is linked to and I could use photos I had saved in Flickr.  Truthfully I use both equally and I have different photos saved to each site, which actually was a nice surprise when my computer crashed taking all the photos I took in Europe with it.

On the agenda for today is candy making.  Alyssa is coming over and we are going to be truffle making machines!  I made truffles last year and decided it would be more fun with friends, so I invited Alyssa, Angelina and Amanda (all my "A" girls!), but Amanda had plans and I never heard either way from Angelina.  Although it may just be me and Alyssa it will still be fun.  I'm going to lug my TV back downstairs so that we can watch Christmas movies during.  We're making 6 different types of truffles, and hopefully we can get about 4 dozen out of each type, so that would be 24 dozen or 288 truffles!  Which, split 2 ways, is 12 dozen (144) each.  I plan to give some out to friends and co-workers.  Also we're going to dip caramels in chocolate and nonpareils - an easy way to make a nice looking festive candy.  Last year they were some of the most popular candies I made, and hands down the easiest!

I'm also going to assemble cookie jars for my coworkers today - the kind of jars where you layer all of the dry ingredients for a batch of cookies and they just have to add butter and eggs.  I'm making 3 different types - including a diabetic friendly version (made with splenda) for a coworker who is diabetic.  Tomorrow is macaron day.  I'm planning on making 4 varieties for my friends.  Once I had discovered that I could make an almost passably French macaron, I fell in love with making them.  They just require a lot of planning so that you can achieve optimal results.  Tartelette has a good tutorial if you're interested in trying to make them yourself.

I got my last ornament from the swap in the mail on Thursday - I'll post pictures of the last few on Monday. 

Now if anyone has any ideas as to what I can get my brother-in-law, who is currently getting his PhD in English Lit, I would welcome any suggestions.  Preferably suggestions under $20!

Unless I win the football pool this week.  Then I could afford a $30 present ;o)

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